A closer comparison would be to Argo Workflow. Tekton and Argo Workflow provide ways to declare workflow pipelines for execution on Kubernetes. Tekton focuses on source based workflows, while Argo is more general purpose.

We've been working with the Argo team to make sure Argo CD works well with Tekton, and we now have a first-class integration in the tekton catalog, contributed by that team.

Disclosure: one of the leads and founders of the Tekton project.

Lead and core contributor to Argoproj here.

I agree that Tekton and Argo Workflows share a closer comparison than with Argo CD (despite the "CD" acronym appearing in the name Tekton CD). Workflows is aimed to be a more general purpose workflow engine. I like to explain workflows as a fancy Kubernetes Job object, which can be used as a building block to higher level applications.

I believe the majority of workflow users are using workflows for ML, ETL, data processing pipelines. Its strength is being able to leverage your kubernetes cluster as an auto-scaling compute grid, with highly advanced scheduling capabilities (i.e. scheduling based on node attributes, pod priorities, resource requirements, etc...). That said, a fair share of users are using workflows as a lightweight CI solution, though it requires work to glue in other components to provide the complete solution (e.g. Argo Events to handle git webhooks)

How much, if at all, has the investment from Google in open source projects like Tekton changed at all with the post-Diane Greene leadership?

I can't speak for projects in general, but I haven't noticed any changes on Tekton or the other things I work on.

Would you normally recommend running tekton in its own k8s cluster, or within the same cluster that runs production workloads? (Particularly if running in something like gke or eks)

Yeah, pretty similar overall. Tho Tekton is also the underlying technology for Jenkins X. With Jenkins being such a common system in the CI/CD space, I think we'll see Tekton preferred going forward.

https://jenkins-x.io/

That...is an interesting dependency direction? Isn't Tekton MUCH newer? Are they developed by similar people?

Different groups of people working on the two projects, though we communicate pretty frequently.

Even the Argo team isn’t investing much effort into Argo workflows and Argo ci.

I'm not sure what gives that impression, but Argo Workflows is under heavy development and is used by several large organizations, including Intuit (Argo team is part of Intuit).

This handles the ci part. Argo handles the cd. I use them both together now.

I'd love to hear more about how you're using them if you don't mind sharing. I work on Tekton at Google.

Essentially just replacing kubectl apply in a normal Tekton pipeline with a git push and telling Argo to sync.