The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) has voted to accept Tekton as a CNCF incubating project.
What is Tekton?
Tekton is a powerful and flexible open source framework for creating continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) systems that allows developers to build, test, and deploy across multiple cloud providers and on-premises systems by abstracting away the underlying implementation details.
While widely adopted for CI/CD, Tekton serves as a general-purpose, security-minded, Kubernetes-native workflow engine. Its composable primitives (Steps, Tasks and Pipelines) allow developers to orchestrate any type of sequential or parallel workload on Kubernetes. Tekton provides a standard, Kubernetes-native interface for defining these workflows, making them portable and reusable.
Tekton’s Key Milestones
The project has matured into a leading framework for Kubernetes-native CI/CD, reaching its stable v1.0 release for the core Pipelines component.
By joining the CNCF, Tekton aligns itself more closely with the ecosystem it powers. It integrates deeply with other CNCF projects like Argo CD (for GitOps) and SPIFFE/SPIRE (for identity), and also Sigstore via OpenSSF (for signing and verification), creating a robust supply chain security story.
Tekton is widely adopted in the industry and used by companies like Puppet and Ford Motor Company. Additionally, Tekton powers major commercial CI/CD offerings, including, but not limited to: Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines and IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery.
A Message from the Tekton Team
“One of the accomplishments I’m most proud of is the broad adoption of Tekton across open source projects, commercial products, and in-house platforms. Seeing teams rely on it in production and build on it within their own ecosystems has been especially rewarding. As a Kubernetes-native project that integrates naturally with other CNCF technologies, Tekton has benefited from close collaboration within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation community. I’m looking forward to deepening those partnerships, learning from our peers across CNCF projects, and meeting more Tekton users who are shaping what cloud native delivery looks like in practice.”
— Andrea Frittoli, Tekton Governing Board Member
“What I’m most proud of is how Tekton has shown that CI/CD can be a true Kubernetes-native primitive, not just another layer on top. Seeing projects like Shipwright—itself a CNCF project—and Konflux build on Tekton as their foundation validates that vision. Building all of this alongside a diverse, multi-vendor community with Red Hat, Google, IBM, and many individual contributors has been one of the most rewarding open source experiences of my career. I’m looking forward to what comes next. The future of Tekton is Trusted Artifacts changing how tasks share data, a simpler developer experience through Pipelines as Code, and deeper collaboration with CNCF projects like Sigstore and Argo CD. Tekton is fundamentally a Kubernetes project, and CNCF is its natural home.”
— Vincent Demeester, Tekton Governing Board Member
Support from TOC Sponsors
The CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) provides technical leadership to the cloud native community. It defines and maintains the foundation’s technical vision, approves new projects, and stewards them across maturity levels. The TOC also aligns projects within the overall ecosystem, sets cross-cutting standards and best practices and works with end users to ensure long-term sustainability. As part of its charter, the TOC evaluates and supports projects as they meet the requirements for incubation and continue progressing toward graduation.
“Tekton has proven itself as core infrastructure for Kubernetes-native delivery. Its move to incubation reflects strong multi-vendor governance and deep alignment with CNCF projects focused on GitOps, identity and software supply chain security.”
— Chad Beaudin, TOC Sponsor, Cloud Native Computing Foundation
“Tekton’s composable design and broad adoption make it an important part of the cloud native workflow landscape. The TOC’s vote recognizes a healthy contributor community and a clear roadmap.”
— Jeremy Rickard, TOC Sponsor, Cloud Native Computing Foundation
The Main Components of Tekton
- Pipelines: The core building blocks (Tasks, Pipelines, Workspaces) for defining CI/CD workflows.
- Triggers: Allows pipelines to be instantiated based on events (like Git pushes or pull requests).
- CLI: A command-line interface for interacting with Tekton resources.
- Dashboard: A web-based UI for visualizing and managing pipelines.
- Chains: A supply chain security tool that automatically signs and attests artifacts built by Tekton.
Community Highlights
These community metrics signal strong momentum and healthy open source governance. For a CNCF project, this level of engagement builds trust with adopters, ensures long-term sustainability and reflects the collaborative innovation that defines the cloud native ecosystem. Tekton’s notable milestones include:
- 11,000+ GitHub Stars (across all repositories)
- 5,000+ Pull Requests
- 2,500+ Issues
- 600+ Contributors
- 1.0 Stable Release of Pipelines
The Future of Tekton
The Tekton roadmap focuses on stability, security and scalability. Key initiatives from the project board and enhancement proposals (TEPs) include:
- Supply Chain Security: Enhancing Tekton Chains to meet SLSA Level 3 requirements by default, including better provenance for build artifacts.
- Trusted Artifacts: Introducing a secure and efficient way to pass data between tasks without relying on shared storage (PVCs), significantly improving performance and isolation (TEP-0139).
- Concise Syntax: Exploring less verbose syntax for referencing remote tasks and pipelines to improve developer experience (TEP-0154).
- Advanced Scheduling: Integrating with Kueue for better job queuing and priority management of PipelineRuns.
- Tekton Results: Moving the Results API to stable to provide long-term history and query capabilities for PipelineRuns and TaskRuns.
- Catalog Evolution: Transitioning reusable tasks to Artifact Hub for better discoverability and standardized distribution.
- Pipelines as Code: Continued investment in Git-based workflows, improving the “as code” experience for defining and managing pipelines.
For more details, see the Tekton Project Board and approved TEPs (Tekton Enhancement Proposals).
As a CNCF-hosted project, Tekton is committed to the principles of open source, neutrality and collaboration. We invite global developers and ecosystem partners to join us in enabling data to flow and be efficiently used freely anywhere, anytime. For more information on maturity requirements for each level, please visit the CNCF Graduation Criteria.