Tekton Reviews

While working with the client at Deloitte, we focused on enhancing our DevOps practices and ensuring site availability through continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Jenkins was the primary technology in use at that time. However, the client expressed interest in transitioning to cloud-native, more efficient solutions to create a futuristic platform. We chose Tekton due to its compatibility with Red Hat OpenShift, which was already part of the client's Red Hat subscription. Tekton's ease of customization and availability as a default plugin in Red Hat OpenShift made it the preferred choice for our project.

Tekton's most important feature is its cloud-native nature. Unlike Jenkins, which may not scale as efficiently, Tekton's CI pipeline can automatically scale up to handle increased workload demands without needing manual adjustments.

Another important aspect is the level of customization offered by Tekton. Each task in the CI pipeline can be customized independently, allowing developers to write code in various languages like shell scripting, Java, or Python and incorporate them into the pipeline as needed. This level of abstraction and customization greatly benefits developers in creating efficient CI pipelines.

Also, it can be challenging to understand the logs and troubleshoot issues without clear guidance. It's not always easy to reach technical support and get immediate answers. In my opinion, improvement in this area would be beneficial.

We use Tekton as a pipeline, specifically a CI/CD pipeline. We have created all these stages, such as build, deploy, and test, within Tekton in an OpenShift cluster. We use these technologies for all our development code. We have written our developing code in Java, Scala, and Tekton. 

Our workflow includes creating embedding vectors, detecting secrets in the GitHub repository, and more, all managed by Tekton stages.

Moving from Jenkins to Tekton has significantly reduced our costs. Previously, we were spending around $6,000 per day on our Jenkins pipeline for the same workload, whereas now we only spend around $1,000 dollars per day. This reduction is due to Tekton's cloud-native nature, which allows for efficient resource consumption and auto-scaling. By implementing Tekton, we have achieved a six times cost reduction.

I have been using Tekton for close to the last three years. The major reason is that I'm part of the IBM Cloud Kubernetes service, and most of my work is on Kubernetes. Tekton being Kubernetes native, was one of the reasons to adopt it. IBM is already doing a lot of work around Tekton.

Tekton has significantly helped us take the workload off Jenkins. This has directly impacted the cost of maintaining Jenkins. Tekton being lightweight means that the resource impression is much less compared to Jenkins when running inside Kubernetes clusters. If we were running 200 complex jobs or pipelines with Jenkins, we have been able to do the same in Tekton with a much smaller number of resources, almost half.

We are using Tekton for building some of our CI pipeline, continuous integration pipeline, as well as integrating some of our other pipelines, such as test pipelines.

In terms of cost savings, Tekton does not require licensing. If you have a Kubernetes or OpenShift environment, everything related to Tekton is free. Additionally, there are time-saving benefits as Tekton makes it easy to bring up pipelines quickly, which is particularly useful if the environment is lost.

We use the product to create and configure pipelines, manage continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes, and handle deployment activities for various environments such as development, staging, and production. It is instrumental in managing deployments in a microservice architecture.

The platform's most valuable feature is the ability to manage pipelines step-by-step. The 'promote' feature is beneficial as it simplifies deployment processes by allowing easy promotion of applications to different environments without needing to re-run CI/CD processes. 

Tekton is used as a Kubernetes native tool for creating CI/CD pipelines. It is used for creating multiple tasks that can run as pipeline runs for several services. This helps in reducing time wastage and has several benefits. I work mostly on creating tasks and pipelines while my colleague handles the initial setup and login.

Tekton is beneficial for our CI/CD processes by enabling multiple task runs, which means we can use the same task for multiple services or deployments, saving time. It scales automatically based on the number of tasks or pipelines running, which is efficient and effective for our development needs.

I am a PHP developer, and I create software for my clients. In the IBM cloud, I manage all my source code by GitLab. Every project I develop is ultimately deployed into a container on Kubernetes. Toolchains on IBM Cloud manage all the steps to deploy my projects, and all of these toolchains are made with Tekton.

One of the best things I appreciate is that Tekton runs on the Kubernetes platform. This is very useful when working on a project with other team members. For instance, suppose we have a very big project that requires building a large amount of source code or running many unit tests. During the build and unit test phases, Tekton on Kubernetes allows us to have a scalable machine to handle these tasks. This scalability is the most useful aspect for me.

On the other hand, if you have a simple project but many programmers continuously commit code, having a scalable machine to manage the entire toolchain is also very beneficial. The tool is easy to understand and comes with documentation. 

One feature I appreciate in Tekton is the ability to segment your toolchain into different tasks. For example, before building my source code, I can personalize a task to check the syntax with tools like Linter. Additionally, before running unit tests, I can check for updates to an SQL database or generate documentation using Javadoc style. Personalizing each task and segmenting the toolchain is extremely useful for me.

We mostly use Tekton to run all of our pipelines. We create unit tests and also use it for Jira build messages as well as the Docker build application. We check the logs within Tekton itself and create a manifest to deploy in our development, test, and other environments.

We can create multiple pipelines with Tekton. I find it beneficial to show data from Tekton to another GitHub or Bitbucket pipeline.