Cloud-Native vs Portable Infrastructure#

Every infrastructure decision sits on a spectrum between portability and fidelity. On one end, you have generic Kubernetes running on minikube or kind – it works everywhere, costs nothing, and captures the behavior of the Kubernetes API itself. On the other end, you have cloud-native managed services – EKS with IRSA and ALB Ingress Controller, GKE with Workload Identity and Cloud Load Balancing, AKS with Azure AD Pod Identity and Azure Load Balancer. These capture the behavior of the actual platform your workloads will run on.

Tekton Pipelines#

Tekton is a Kubernetes-native CI/CD framework. Every pipeline concept – tasks, runs, triggers – is a Kubernetes Custom Resource. Pipelines execute as pods. There is no central server, no UI-driven configuration, no special runtime. If you know Kubernetes, you know how to operate Tekton.

Core Concepts#

Tekton has four primary resources:

• Task: A sequence of steps that run in a single pod. Each step is a container.
• TaskRun: An instantiation of a Task with specific inputs. Creating a TaskRun executes the Task.
• Pipeline: An ordered collection of Tasks with dependencies, parameter passing, and conditional execution.
• PipelineRun: An instantiation of a Pipeline. Creating a PipelineRun executes the entire pipeline.

The separation between definition (Task/Pipeline) and execution (TaskRun/PipelineRun) means you define your CI/CD process once and trigger it many times with different inputs.