Red Hat has relaid the pipeline options in its OpenShift container platform, throwing its weight behind the nascent Tekton CI/CD project.

The vendor has long supported Jenkins for CI/CD within OpenShift, but this week announced a developer preview of “OpenShift Pipelines” which it said would “enable cloud-native Kubernetes-style continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines based on the Tekton project. “

Red Hat explained Jenkins “was designed before the existence of cloud-native paradigms which made it difficult to run in containerised environments like Kubernetes.

Red Hat said Tekton will “enable teams to build Kubernetes-style delivery pipelines that they can fully control and own the complete lifecycle of their microservices without having to rely on central teams to maintain and manage a CI server, plugins, and its configurations.”

While Red Hat will continue to support Jenkins images on OpenShift, the Tekton-based OpenShift Pipelines would provide a “a cloud-native CI/CD experience that is built for containers and Kubernetes as a first-class platform.”

As well as providing the base for a Kubernetes pipeline, Red Hat said Pipelines would allow for serverless operations, meaning no CI/CD server to maintain, and allow users to take full advantage of Kubernetes-focused tools.

Tekton was one of the founder projects of the Continuous Delivery Foundation, launched back in March, as was Jenkins. Google is a premier member of the group, as is Jenkins backer CloudBees.

Brian Gracely, director of product strategy at Red Hat said there was no intention to deprecate Jenkins in OpenShift, “But the broader CI/CD community is beginning to look at Cloud-native CI/CD systems. Tekton is the first project from this new community collaboration.”

He added that customers had “many opinions” around CI/CD, and OpenShift had to be “flexible” in its approach.

Tracy Miranda, director of Open Source Community at CloudBees said: “The Jenkins community response to the emergence of cloud native technologies is Jenkins X. Jenkins X is the CI/CD solution for modern cloud applications on Kubernetes.”

She added, “Jenkins X offers both Jenkins and Tekton options to users. The first option – with Jenkins masters – works well for those who have complex requirements or sophisticated existing Jenkins pipelines…Jenkins X is the optimal way to use Tekton and have advanced delivery features such as preview environments, git chatops and built-in GitOps.”