OpenShift Pipelines is a cloud-native, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) solution based on Kubernetes resources. It uses Tekton building blocks to automate deployments across multiple platforms by abstracting away the underlying implementation details.  Openshift Pipelines, designed for decentralized teams with modern microservice based architecture, easily integrates with existing kubernetes tools, thus enabling customers to scale on demand. With increased adoption of a hybrid cloud strategy by enterprises, Openshift Pipelines provides tremendous flexibility to build, test and deploy across multiple platforms based on the team’s requirements.

We are pleased to announce that Openshift Pipelines 1.9 is now generally available for all our customers on Openshift 4.11+. The release brings one major announcement on the Tekton project and various exciting new features.

Tekton graduates from the CDF

Tekton has reached graduated status within the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) on November 10, 2022. Tekton becomes the second project to graduate from CD foundation after Jenkins.

As stated by CD foundation, “The Graduated Stage is for projects that have reached their growth goals and are now on a sustaining cycle of development, maintenance, and long-term support. Graduated Stage projects are used commonly in enterprise production environments and have large, well-established project communities.”

Red Hat is proud to be a core contributor to Tekton and we are excited to continue to bring in Openshift with Openshift Pipelines.

Pipelines as Code is now Generally Available

Pipelines as code is an technique well accepted within industry which resonates with the idea of infrastructure as code, the technique states that the configuration of delivery pipelines that build, test and deploy our applications or infrastructure should be treated as code; they should be placed under source control and modularized in reusable components with automated testing and deployment.

We are pleased to announce that Pipelines as Code, an opinionated CI based on OpenShift Pipelines, is now generally available for all of our customers with Openshift Pipelines 1.9. The goal of Pipelines as Code is to let you define your Tekton templates inside your source code repository and have the pipeline run and report the status of the execution when triggered by a Pull Request or a Push. Pipeline as Code comes with various features like

• Pull-request status support: When iterating over a Pull Request. Statuses and Control is done on GitHub.
• GitHub Checks API support to set the status of a PipelineRun including rechecks
• Automatic Task resolution in Pipelines (local Tasks, Tekton Hub, and remote URLs)
• Git events Filtering and support for separate pipelines for each event
• Gitlab, Bitbucket Server, Bitbucket Cloud and GitHub Webhook support.

In the 1.9 release, we are adding many more exciting features. Some of them are

• support for concurrency limit in the Repository CRD to define the maximum number of PipelineRuns running for a repository at a time.
• support of  advanced event matching on file path using Common Expression Language (CEL) for push and pull requests to GitHub and GitLab.
• support for authentication of URLs in the Pipelines as Code resolver with the Git provider.

Figure 1: Pipeline Status in GitHub

Figure 2: Error Logs in GitHub

Resolvers released as Tech Preview

Resolver helps “resolve” requests for Tasks and Pipelines from remote locations for example  if a user has submitted a PipelineRun that needed a Pipeline YAML stored in a git repo, resolver will fetch the YAML file from git and return it to Openshift Pipelines. Openshift Pipelines currently support git, cluster, bundle, hub as resolvers.

A new CLI tool called opc released as Tech Preview

With Pipelines as Code becoming generally available, we want to deliver a uniform user experience for delivering and using CLI for both tkn and tkn pac. Also in future, opc will be a replacement for tkn with additional Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines specific features, which do not necessarily fit in tkn.

Other new features in 1.9

• This release provides support for Container Storage Interface (CSI) and projected volumes for your workspace.
• Tekton Chains now adds support for PipelineRun attestations along with TaskRun.
• And many more..

For a detailed rundown of everything included in this release, check out v1.9 release notes.

Where to next?

You can install Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines using the Operator listed in the OpenShift Container Platform OperatorHub and start using pipelines.

For a more detailed understanding of Openshift Pipelines, check out Understanding OpenShift Pipelines.