Tekton has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubating project. For years, practitioners have used Tekton as the foundation for Kubernetes-native CI/CD. This transition from the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) to the CNCF aligns the project even more closely with the broader Kubernetes ecosystem and the community it serves.
From foundation to foundation: Why the CNCF?
Tekton was created to meet the need for a CI/CD framework that doesn't just run on Kubernetes—it is built for Kubernetes. By using custom resource definitions (CRDs), Tekton helps developers define pipelines as first-class objects in their clusters.
Moving to the CNCF is the next step in the project's growth. Tekton continues to mature, reaching 1.0 stability with Tekton Pipelines. Joining the foundation that hosts Kubernetes, Argo CD, and Helm integrates the project more closely with standardized delivery. This transition encourages collaboration across projects and creates a more consistent experience for developers building modern cloud-native applications.
Red Hat's journey with Tekton
Red Hat has been a leading contributor to Tekton since the project's inception. This support aligns with our strategy to use open standards to prevent vendor lock-in in the CI/CD space.
Throughout this journey, Red Hatters have served as maintainers, contributors, and community leaders for the project. Our work has focused on several key areas:
- Enterprise readiness: We help ensure Tekton meets the security and scalability needs of the world's largest organizations.
- User experience: We developed the Tekton Dashboard and CLI (tkn) to make Tekton more accessible to developers.
- The Hub and Catalog: Red Hat helped create the Tekton Hub, where the community can share and discover reusable tasks and pipelines.
- Standardizing Pipelines-as-Code: Building on our commitment to developer experience, Red Hat contributed the Pipelines-as-Code project to the official Tekton organization. This integration helps developers manage Tekton automation directly from Git repositories, which supports a GitOps approach to CI/CD.
- Integration with OpenShift: Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines uses Tekton to provide CI/CD capabilities for enterprise production environments.
Impact on the ecosystem
Joining the CNCF benefits the entire open source community. Tekton now has access to more resources and a community of more than 150,000 contributors. This helps the project focus on:
- Enhanced interoperability: We plan to work more closely with other projects in the CI/CD space. Aligning technically with the ecosystem helps create a vendor-neutral solution for software development.
- Increased security: The project will use CNCF security audits and best practices to further harden the software supply chain.
- Wider adoption: The CNCF provides a neutral environment where more organizations and vendors can contribute to and use Tekton.
Looking ahead
As we celebrate this transition, Red Hat's mission remains unchanged. We will work with the community to keep Tekton a primary choice for cloud-native delivery.
Whether you are a developer at a startup or an architect at a Fortune 500 company, Tekton's move to the CNCF means your CI/CD pipelines are built on an open and community-driven foundation.
Want to learn more?
- Read the official announcement on the Tekton blog.
- Explore how we use Tekton in Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines.
- Get Involved: We invite you to participate in the future of cloud-native CI/CD! Join the community to contribute code or share your feedback on GitHub.
