DevOps Dictionary

Tekton is an open-source, Kubernetes-native framework for defining and running CI/CD pipelines as declarative resources inside a cluster. It addresses the problem of stitching together build, test, and deploy steps across different tools by providing reusable building blocks such as Tasks (individual steps) and Pipelines (ordered workflows), executed by Kubernetes controllers and pods. Because the pipeline definition lives alongside your infrastructure configuration, it can be versioned, reviewed, and automated consistently across environments.

With Tekton, teams standardize delivery workflows and scale execution using Kubernetes scheduling and isolation; without it, CI/CD often becomes a patchwork of external systems and scripts that drift over time, require bespoke integrations, and increase operational overhead and failure modes. This gap exists because Tekton turns pipeline logic into first-class Kubernetes objects, so the platform can manage retries, credentials, and execution in a uniform way.