The landscape of CI/CD frameworks has evolved over the last couple of years. From the early days of Flux and Jenkins to the current focus on ArgoCD, this journey reflects the industry’s momentum toward efficient and reliable deployments.

In recent times, we have seen many modern software delivery platforms adopt ArgoCD or Flux for automating deployments within their ecosystems. However, as multi-cloud deployments and scalability still remain a challenge, we are seeing the industry shift toward more powerful Kubernetes-native frameworks like Tekton.

Evolution of CI/CD Frameworks

Flux: Paving the Way for GitOps

Flux was one of the pioneers in promoting the GitOps methodology. It allowed developers to manage infrastructure and deployments declaratively through version-controlled manifests.

GitOps, as introduced by Flux, emphasized the use of Git repositories as the single source of truth for configuration, making deployments more reliable and traceable.

Jenkins: The CI/CD Workhorse

With its extensibility and vast plugin ecosystem, Jenkins quickly became the go-to CI/CD solution for many organizations. While Jenkins was powerful, its complexity and challenges in maintaining pipelines led to the exploration of alternative solutions.

Spinnaker: Scaling Deployments

Spinnaker emerged as a powerful tool for continuous delivery with a focus on scalability and multi-cloud deployments.

Its support for canary releases, blue-green deployments, and pipeline orchestration attracted organizations aiming for more sophisticated deployment strategies.

ArgoCD: The Rise of GitOps

ArgoCD brought a renewed focus on GitOps, building upon the foundation laid by Flux. It provided a declarative way to manage Kubernetes applications, ensuring that the desired state in the Git repository is continuously in sync with the cluster state.

The adoption of ArgoCD has been widespread due to its simplicity, scalability and ability to synchronize with multiple clusters.

‘Modern’ DevOps Platforms: Riding the ArgoCD Wave

Many ‘modern’ software delivery platforms have either incorporated or integrated separately with ArgoCD to attempt a complete software delivery approach. This integration enables users to adopt GitOps principles seamlessly within their existing workflows.

Here’s a glimpse into what it looks like to work with ArgoCD on these platforms:

1. First off, you will have to orchestrate CI separately, which leads to context switching and a non-unified CI/CD workflow. You will need to leverage plugins on most of these platforms and hop back and forth between exploring steps and adding them to your pipeline for a few others.
2. For CD, it is essential for you to connect your ArgoCD instance by keying in the server URL. This requires a working understanding of ArgoCD and also a working setup of the same before even signing up to these DevOps platforms.
3. ArgoCD has to be defined as an artifact source and its specific steps must be added as deployment steps while configuring a pipeline. Other platforms require you to include steps or commands within the YAML files to interact with ArgoCD.

While GitOps automation can be achieved by integrating ArgoCD with DevOps platforms, it has to be noted that these are not native workflows. There will be challenges that crop up, like:

1. Improper synchronisation between repository and the deployment state on these platforms could result in unintended deployments or configuration drift.
2. GitOps practices, when coupled with certain platforms, may have limitations in handling multi-cloud or hybrid cloud deployments.
3. The complexity increases with the size of the infrastructure. The larger the number of clusters and environments the greater the number of pipelines and messier the orchestration.
4. The fact that ArgoCD needs to be set up and running before even subscribing to DevOps platforms defeats the purpose of having low-code/no-code DevOps.

The Rise of Tekton

As the industry looks for solutions to address the challenges posed by existing CI/CD frameworks, Tekton has emerged as a promising alternative. Prominent tech enthusiasts in the DevOps space, like CloudBees co-founder Sacha Labourey, and market momentum make it clear that there’s a significant number of organizations working on integrating Tekton within their platforms, just like we saw with ArgoCD a couple of years back.

What’s amazing is we already had platforms like Ozone, which started working on making Tekton enterprise-ready almost three years back and have further evolved over the years.

Tekton: Container-Native CI/CD

Tekton is a Kubernetes-native framework for building CI/CD systems. It provides custom resources to define CI/CD pipelines as code, allowing for greater flexibility and extensibility.

This is done by introducing the concept of tasks that run within a pipeline. These tasks are reusable and pre-defined, all of which can be viewed in the Tekton hub.

What ArgoCD achieves for GitOps is done with just one of the hundreds of task templates that Tekton comes with.

Too good to be true? Well, every rainbow has its rain! Migrating from one framework to another is a huge task, and that is precisely why many enterprises shy away from migration.

Can LLMs Help Automate the Migration of Existing Pipelines to Tekton?

If you look at the diagram below, the answer is a resounding yes. The model is trained based on existing pipelines and what their corresponding Tekton pipelines look like.

The overarching objective of this workflow is to facilitate a seamless conversion process using large language models (LLM) for generative AI.

Central to this approach is using the chat context and the strategic application of roles for LLM models to establish context. Additionally, sample pipelines are leveraged to train and fine-tune the model to define how the corresponding YAML files of all these platforms look for any given pipeline.

Here’s a more detailed read presented by Ozone as an industry-first last year at KubeCon North America.

Conclusion

The evolution of CI/CD frameworks reflects the DevOps industry’s dynamic nature and the demand for efficient software delivery pipelines. From Flux and Jenkins to ArgoCD and Tekton, each framework addresses deployment challenges.

ArgoCD gained traction based on its GitOps principles and Kubernetes integration, yet faces synchronization, multi-cloud support and scalability hurdles. Tekton, a Kubernetes-native CI/CD framework, offers scalability, event-driven architecture and cloud-native practices to make up for these shortcomings.

Whether embracing ArgoCD or exploring Tekton, the goal is resilient, scalable pipelines driving innovation and time-to-market acceleration.

To hear more about cloud-native topics, join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Techstrong Group and the entire cloud-native community in Paris, France at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon EU 2024 – March 19-22, 2024.