The team overseeing the development of the open source Tekton Pipelines under the auspices of the Continuous Delivery (CD) Foundation announced today the project is now in beta.

Christie Wilson, Tekton Project Lead and a software engineer at Google, said Tekton Pipelines are not necessarily a tool most DevOps teams will interact with directly. Rather they provide a foundation on which DevOps platforms can be built that will make it easier for DevOps teams to construct workflows spanning multiple continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms.

As such, Tekton Pipelines should play a critical role in not just fostering interoperability but also alleviating concerns about become locked into a specific CI/CD platform.

The beta release of Tekton Pipelines is significant because it signals that the project is now stable enough to be incorporated in DevOps platforms and from here on will follow the same deprecation policies as Kubernetes in terms of supporting previous releases. However, Wilson noted that Tekton Triggers, Tekton Dashboard, Tekton Pipelines CLI and other components are still alpha and as such may evolve from release to release in a way that is not necessarily backward-compatible just yet.

In the meantime, the Tekton Pipeline team is encouraging all Tekton projects and users to migrate their integrations to the latest version of Custom Resource Definition (CRD), which is the application programming interface (API) supplied. The Tekton Pipeline team is also making available a migration guide.

The Tekton Pipelines project is one of several initiatives being advanced under the guidance of the CD Foundation, which is an arm of The Linux Foundation. Other projects include Jenkins and Jenkins X, a pair of open source CI/CD projects developed originally by CloudBees and Spinnaker, a CD platform originally created by Netflix. Tekton Pipelines are a framework that runs natively on Kubernetes that traces its lineage back to Google.

Premier members for the CD Foundation include CloudBees, Google, Circle CI, JFrog, IBM, CapitalOne, Salesforce and Netflix. Other members of the CD Foundation include GitLab, Red Hat, Harness and Rancher Labs.

Wilson said Jenkins X already supports Tekton Pipelines, while work involving Spinnaker is ongoing. It’s not expected that Jenkins, currently the most widely used CI/CD platform, will be able to employ Tekton Pipelines, said Wilson.

It’s not clear when Tekton Pipelines might be pervasively employed across multiple CI/CD platforms. In theory, as more applications are built on top of Kubernetes, the use of CI/CD platforms that run natively on Kubernetes should increase. However, most organizations that have already adopted a CI/CD platform such as Jenkins are continuing to use the same platform to build and deploy both monolithic and microservices-based applications. At some point, however, it’s expected those organizations will eventually migrate to a CI/CD platform that runs natively on Kubernetes. In many cases, different teams within the same organization may opt to standardize on different CI/CD platforms while still be able to share workflows, said Wilson.

Naturally, providers of DevOps platforms are already jockeying for position now that the race to support Tekton Pipelines as specified by the CD Foundation has formally started.

— Mike Vizard