Tekton is a cloud-native, open-source CI/CD framework built on Kubernetes. It defines pipelines, tasks, and workflows as Kubernetes objects (YAML), eliminating the need for centralized CI servers like Jenkins. Tekton scales horizontally—each task can run in its own container pod—and integrates natively with Kubernetes ecosystem tools (ArgoCD, Prometheus, Helm). Tekton powers CI/CD at major cloud providers and enterprises. It's particularly strong in microservices architectures where build/test/deploy orchestration is complex and scale is essential.