Tekton is an open source project that provides standard Kubernetes-style resources and building blocks for creating CI/CD pipelines that can run on any Kubernetes. Tekton does this by introducing a number of custom resource definitions (CRD) such as Pipeline
, Task
, and ClusterTask
to provide a language and structure for defining delivery pipelines as shown in Figure 1. Tekton also provides a set of controllers that are responsible for running pipelines in pods on demand whenever a user creates an aforementioned resource.

Figure 1: A Tekton pipeline contains a sequence of tasks.
The use of Tekton has grown rapidly over the last year. One of the frequently requested features is the ability to share artifacts between tasks in order to cache dependencies for build tools such as Maven and NPM. Although it was possible previously to use volumes in tasks, the release of Tekton 0.10 adds support for workspaces, which makes it easier for tasks within a pipeline to share artifacts using a persistent volume.
In this article, we look at how workspaces can be used to cache Maven dependencies in Java builds in order to remove the need to download dependencies for each build.
Continue reading “Speed up Maven builds in Tekton Pipelines”