Hi, my name's Matthew Perrins.
I'm part of the IBM Cloud team
and today I'm going to give you an introduction to Tekton.
So, what is Tekton?
Tekton started life as part of the Knative Project
as they were trying to solve specific problems
around how they do continuous integration and continuous delivery of
their software components,
and was later donated to the Continuous Delivery Foundation
where we're now being able to
use it and consume it across multiple
Kubernetes environments and platforms.
So, what I want to do today is give you
an overview of the base concepts
that underpin what Tekton is on,
explain about how you run it inside a Kubernetes environment,
and how it helps you automate and deliver your software components
for running inside that platform.
And then I want to give a brief explanation of how
developers would consume it and work with it
and how that separation of concerns may go forward.
So, base level component of a Tekton continuous integration or
delivery pipeline is something called a task. And a task is an automation task,
yeah an automation tasks that you need to create that will help you build, test,
deploy, manage, check the health of a particular piece of software. Once you
create a number of tasks you can actually isolate them and reuse them
very easily and Tekton one of the real benefits is that it allows you to
separate your tasks that are then consumed by your developers and I'll
explain that in a little bit more detail as we move forward. So, once you've got a
base element task you can create something called a pipeline and a
pipeline can be made up about any number of tasks
so you can customize that and tailor it for the specific software needs that you
have. Once you've defined a pipeline you can trigger a pipeline from something
called a pipeline run, and you create multiple runs in a software delivery
project but it will continue to run the exact same definition of the pipeline
that you defined with the exact same definition of the task that you define.
Now one of the next pieces of key information to make this sequence run
smoothly is you need to provide some data for that execution so that you can
tailor and customize it. Anything from a build number to supplying a unique git
repository or supplying a Docker image and this is called
Pipeline Resource Res. So, now we built these base components for a Tekton
Pipeline what we need to do is then start to think about how we prepare a
developer to consume them. So, what you would typically do is you'd register your
common tasks into your Kubernetes environment inside the Tekton Execution
Engine that you will install inside Kubernetes, and those tasks can be commonly
shared across different applications or different development teams. So, it allows
a level of management and control that can be owned by the operation, the
operations side of your DevOps organization. So, Tekton itself runs
inside the Kubernetes cluster and it associates very cleanly to a lot of the
Kubernetes concepts like pods and services and CRD, CRC, YAML definitions. So,
once you've got your pipelines defined or the concepts about how you're going
to use your pipelines and once you've actually installed and got Tekton
running inside your Kubernetes environment, what we need to do is then talk about
how a developer would start using that in the creation
and delivery of their projects. So, as I mentioned you can have different Tekton
pipeline definitions and we'll call that pipeline YAML and you can define that
file inside your individual application and the relationship if you remember is
a pipeline can run any number of tasks and these tasks have been already
registered and defined inside the Tekton environment. So, you can have task 1, task
2, task 3, and keep going, and within each task you can have a
number of steps and again you can have any number of steps depending on the
particular problem you're trying to solve.
So once you've defined your pipeline definition inside your application then
the developer can push their change to their Git Repository and this will allow
them to iterate multiple times on code changes or definition changes or feature
and function improvements. And what happens is this triggers a webhook which
will then trigger a type a Tekton execution which will then marry the two
elements together, it will marry their pipeline definition that comes from the
application and it will take the tasks that you've defined inside your Tekton
environment and this could result and we hope it does successful delivery of your
applications into specific namespaces, whether it be a dev, a test, or a pre-prod.
So, you've actually packaged up your code into a K8, a K8 image registry and from
there you've now got a piece of packaged software that you can then roll out and
deploy to other environments. So, I hope you enjoyed that walkthrough and
you've got some information about the basic concepts of what Tekton
is, how applications can use it, and how you run it on top of the Kubernetes
platform. Thank you if you have any questions please drop us a line below. If
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