Tekton Pipelines: Cloud-Native CI/CD on Kubernetes with Tasks, Pipelines, and Triggers

Calendar February 22, 2026
Cicd
Intermediate
Ci-Pipeline-Design, Tekton-Authoring, Kubernetes-Native-Cicd
Tekton, Kubernetes, Cicd, Pipeline, Cloud-Native, Tasks, Triggers, Catalog
Tekton, Kubectl, Tkn, Docker

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.