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Comment by tcbasche | Hacker News Reader

I have had good experiences with Concourse CI, especially for trunk-based development

I really liked the expressivity of the yaml syntax when I did some prototyping with Concourse recently, and the Resource abstraction is very nice.

I found the docs to be thorough for the API, and really sparse for how to actually wire up a GitHub build pipeline or do a deploy to k8s, seems it’s really niche and not many people are writing guides, which concerns me.

How do you host concourse? Did you adopt their entire stack? Last time I looked at it, it seemed cool but I had no interest in learning BOSH.

I also love Concourse and feel it has the perfect set of abstractions to be able to compose arbitrarily complex pipelines. You can extend it by creating your own resources (I actually wrote a tool to help make this easier[0]). The pipeline visualization is better than anything else I've seen. I'm not aware of a hosted Concourse solution, but there really should be.

BOSH is not a requirement to host it yourself, and I've never used it.

Probably the easiest way to run it is to use the helm chart[1] and run it on Kubernetes. There are some things to keep in mind, like the workers have their own containerizer that is not Kubernetes-aware. You don't want it competing with Kubernetes for scheduling containers, so it's best to let the worker pods be the the "owner" of their node, and you can use affinities to enforce that.

At one company where we ran it directly on VMs in AWS, I used Ansible to build the CloudFormation stacks for the database (Aurora) and autoscaling groups, and the machines self-configured with Ansible to download and extract the Concourse tarball and start it. I wish I could make that code public but it now lives inside the company where I used it. I guess my point is that running it isn't magic, it's just a program (actually two, web and worker) that you start with some arguments that are pretty well documented[2].

0. https://github.com/cloudboss/ofcourse 1. https://github.com/concourse/concourse-chart 2. https://concourse-ci.org/install.html

> I'm not aware of a hosted Concourse solution, but there really should be.

Yes, there should. If you're a VC and that interests you, I've got so many slides.

It all runs on a couple of ec2 instances in AWS. I'm not the guy who installed it (and I started at my current company after it was setup so maybe it was complicated?) but as far as maintenance goes it's been pretty much set and forget. Our team is pretty DevOps heavy and we never really need to do anything with it.

Definitely easier though than using something like Jenkins, but personally I'm a big fan of Github Actions. I've never used it in a production setting though, only for personal projects.

Kubernetes deployments overtook BOSH deployments in the last Concourse community survey: https://blog.concourse-ci.org/community-survey-2020-results/...

I suspect that support for the BOSH deployment will eventually be discontinued.

Disclosure: I work for VMware, which sponsors Concourse. My own views.

Been using PKS for almost all of this year at work and it feels very much like 'the writing is on the wall'.

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