Charged particle tracks and track-based higher level observables are a key ingredient of the event reconstruction for the CMS experiment. In 2017, the CMS pixel detector was upgraded, promising significantly improved performance, but also requiring a concerted commissioning effort and improved algorithms to realize this potential from the start of the data taking in that year. Described are the alignment procedure and tracking algorithms used in 2017, as well as the potential
tracking performance with future upgrades. Additionally, recent and future b-tagging developments and the resulting performance improvements are discussed.