This is a summary of conversations held at the Tekton booth during KubeCon. It reflects recurring themes across attendees.
Highlights from the Booth
multiple conversations stood out as strong signals of Tekton's value in production:
Positive Signals from Users
User Running Tekton in Production: Happy in Daily Operations
We spoke with a user running Tekton for their CI workloads in the cloud. Onboarding was challenging, but once past that initial hurdle, they described their day-to-day experience as very positive. They have built a mature setup using Triggers not PaC and are running smoothly in production.
Experienced Tekton / Pipelines User
Another user with strong familiarity with Tekton and pipeline tools offered genuinely enthusiastic feedback, particularly around the event-based pruner and Results. They were actively exploring ways to increase productivity and efficiency in their current setup and showed real interest in understanding the product roadmap. That said, some of their users remain on other tools because they cannot find equivalents for features like JUnit test reporting.
Interest in Konflux-like Approach
One of the visitors expressed interest in a Konflux-like approach, inspired by what they had seen at FOSDEM. This signals that Tekton helps users reason about their supply chain and identify key steps to drive improvements.
Who We Met
We spoke with users coming from GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Cloud Foundry, Tekton on IBM Cloud, Bamboo, and Jenkins. Each tool comes with its own frustrations, but what stood out is that there is a common pull and curiosity toward Tekton: it runs natively on Kubernetes, right where their workloads already live.
Most non-Tekton users came with a specific question: can Tekton solve this problem for me? Some had already tried it or read about it. What follows is what they ran into.
Key Observations
1. Getting Started Is Not Obvious
New users often hit friction early; the onboarding experience has real room to grow:
- Documentation feels outdated and fragmented. Concepts are introduced in isolation rather than as part of a coherent workflow.
- No clear "start here" path.
- Getting started material is scattered across components, with no single path that walks a new user through building and running a complete pipeline.
2. Starter Workflows & Catalog
- The catalog landscape is confusing between Tekton Hub, ArtifactHub, and the migration between them.
- It's not clear where to look or what to trust. Many tasks appear unmaintained.
- No recommended starting point for common workflows.
3. Pipeline Design Best Practices
Users explicitly asked for opinionated guidance on how to structure pipelines:
- Large monolithic tasks vs. small modular tasks: when to use each and what the trade-offs are.
- Workspace & data sharing: how to share data between tasks without tight coupling.
- Pipeline reusability & centralisation: how to create shared pipeline templates and task libraries across teams, including versioning.
4. Productivity Features Are Fragmented
- Users wanted to know how Tekton could make their pipelines faster and their teams more efficient.
- Features like caching, pruning, and results exist, but they are scattered across the docs with no cohesive story around what they unlock together.
5. Scheduling, Affinity & Windows Support
- Users asked about workload placement strategies and automatic affinity handling.
- One attendee specifically asked how to target a Windows VM for native Windows builds — the current path is not straightforward.
6. Jenkins Ecosystem Expectations
- Users migrating from Jenkins expect some integrations to exist out of the box:
- JUnit / e2e test reporting: no clear equivalent or recommended pattern.
- SonarQube reporting: no native visibility into analysis results.
- The current experience feels less integrated than Jenkins plugins for these workflows.
7. Dashboard & RBAC
- The dashboard received positive feedback overall.
- A recurring request: RBAC / authentication support — users want to control who can see and trigger what, especially in multi-team environments.
- Pipeline visibility also needs improvement: better run overviews, easier navigation between steps, and clearer logs.
This is a summary of conversations held at the Tekton booth during KubeCon. It reflects recurring themes across attendees.
Highlights from the Booth
multiple conversations stood out as strong signals of Tekton's value in production:
Positive Signals from Users
User Running Tekton in Production: Happy in Daily Operations
We spoke with a user running Tekton for their CI workloads in the cloud. Onboarding was challenging, but once past that initial hurdle, they described their day-to-day experience as very positive. They have built a mature setup using Triggers not PaC and are running smoothly in production.
Experienced Tekton / Pipelines User
Another user with strong familiarity with Tekton and pipeline tools offered genuinely enthusiastic feedback, particularly around the event-based pruner and Results. They were actively exploring ways to increase productivity and efficiency in their current setup and showed real interest in understanding the product roadmap. That said, some of their users remain on other tools because they cannot find equivalents for features like JUnit test reporting.
Interest in Konflux-like Approach
One of the visitors expressed interest in a Konflux-like approach, inspired by what they had seen at FOSDEM. This signals that Tekton helps users reason about their supply chain and identify key steps to drive improvements.
Who We Met
We spoke with users coming from GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Cloud Foundry, Tekton on IBM Cloud, Bamboo, and Jenkins. Each tool comes with its own frustrations, but what stood out is that there is a common pull and curiosity toward Tekton: it runs natively on Kubernetes, right where their workloads already live.
Most non-Tekton users came with a specific question: can Tekton solve this problem for me? Some had already tried it or read about it. What follows is what they ran into.
Key Observations
1. Getting Started Is Not Obvious
New users often hit friction early; the onboarding experience has real room to grow:
2. Starter Workflows & Catalog
3. Pipeline Design Best Practices
Users explicitly asked for opinionated guidance on how to structure pipelines:
4. Productivity Features Are Fragmented
5. Scheduling, Affinity & Windows Support
6. Jenkins Ecosystem Expectations
7. Dashboard & RBAC