Tekton Concepts

Internal

• Tekton
• Tekton Operations

Overview

Tekton is a cloud-native solution for building CI/CD pipelines. Tekton installs and runs as an extension on your Kubernetes cluster and uses the well-established Kubernetes resource model. Tekton workloads execute inside Kubernetes containers. It has several components: Tekton Pipelines, Tekton CLI and Tekton Catalog. Tekton is part of the CD Foundation, a Linux Foundation project. It is implemented as a set of Kubernetes Custom Resources. Once deployed, Tekton can be accessed via Tekton CLI commands or API calls.

Tekton Domain Model

Task

https://github.com/tektoncd/pipeline/blob/main/docs/tasks.md

A task defines a series of ordered steps, which are executed in order in which they are declared. The output of a step can be used as the input of the next step.

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: Task
metadata:
  name: hello
spec:
  steps:
    - name: echo
      image: alpine
      script: |
        #!/bin/sh
        echo "Hello World"

Task Operations

• List tasks

Step

A step processes a set of inputs and produces a set of outputs.

TaskRun

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: TaskRun
metadata:
  name: hello-task-run
spec:
  taskRef:
    name: hello

TaskRun Operations

• List taskruns
• Display execution log of a taskrun

Pipeline

https://github.com/tektoncd/pipeline/blob/main/docs/pipelines.md

A pipeline defines a series of ordered tasks. Just like steps, a task in a pipeline can use as input the output of a previously executed task.

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: Task
metadata:
  name: task1
spec:
  steps:
    - name: echo
      image: alpine
      script: |
        #!/bin/sh
        echo "this is Task 1 output"
---
apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: Task
metadata:
  name: task2
spec:
  steps:
    - name: echo
      image: alpine
      script: |
        #!/bin/sh
        echo "this is Task 2 output"
---
apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: Pipeline
metadata:
  name: simple-pipeline
spec:
  tasks:
    - name: task1
      taskRef:
        name: task1
    - name: task2
      runAfter:
        - task1
      taskRef:
        name: task2

PipelineRun

apiVersion: tekton.dev/v1beta1
kind: PipelineRun
metadata:
  name: simple-pipeline-run
spec:
  pipelineRef:
    name: simple-pipeline

PipelineRun Operations

• List pipelinerun
• Display execution log of a pipelinerun

Trigger

Implemented as part of the Tekton Triggers component.

Input

The input is defined relative to a step.

Output

The output is defined relative to a step.

Tekton Components

Tekton Pipelines

https://github.com/tektoncd/pipeline/blob/main/docs/README.md

Tekton Pipelines is the foundation of Tekton. It is implemented as a set of Kubernetes Custom Resources.

Tekton Pipeline Operations

• Installation

Tekton CLI

https://github.com/tektoncd/cli/blob/main/README.md

Tekton CLI provides the command interface called tkn.

Tekton CLI Operations

• Installation

Tekton API

Tekton APIs are currently available for Pipelines and Triggers allow you to programmatically interact with the Tekton components.

Tekton Catalog

https://github.com/tektoncd/catalog/blob/v1beta1/README.md

Tekton Catalog is a repository of community-contributed Tekton building blocks.

Tekton Hub

https://hub.tekton.dev

https://github.com/tektoncd/hub/blob/main/README.md

Tekton Hub is a web GUI to access Tekton Catalog.

Tekton Triggers

https://github.com/tektoncd/triggers/blob/main/README.md

Tekton Triggers provide triggers, which allow instantiating pipelines based on events (a PR merge, etc.)

Tekton Dashboard

https://github.com/tektoncd/dashboard/blob/main/README.md

Tekton Dashboard is the web GUI that displays information about pipeline execution.

Tekton Operator

https://github.com/tektoncd/operator/blob/main/README.md

Tekton Operator is the implementation of the Kubernetes Operator pattern that assists with the operation of the Tekton projects.

Building Block

Tekton documentation refers to "building blocks". Those are ...