The Gist of Concourse

-The Gist of Concourse

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alternate-uis.md

• What are some good ways to see many pipelines on the same screen at the same time?
• it would be great to have an overall status of all the pipelines rather then clicking each one.
• Hello fellow pivot what's that tool on your screen that shows all the Concourses?

inputs_and_outputs.md

Task Inputs and Outputs

TL;DR:

• you can think of these as named directories of files
• tasks explicitly define what inputs they take in and which outputs they produce
• a resource get implicitly produces an output
• inputs and outputs are scoped to a job, so to pass around bits between jobs you will need a resource

Inputs of a task allow volumes to be mounted into a task container from a previous step output within the same job.

why_bosh.md

Why do I Need BOSH Just to Deploy to AWS?

TL;DR:

BOSH is not explicitly required to run Concourse on AWS ( or any IaaS ). If you just want to get the Concourse Web UI and Worker(s) up on AWS, I'd suggest running the binaries on EC2 instances (and optionally work your way up to EBS if you think you need it); with one EC2 instance running concourse web and another (or several others) running concourse worker.

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You can use whatever infrastructure automation tooling & process you're comfortable with to get the binaries up to the EC2 instance and keep them running. That will reduce the cognitive overhead to learn AWS, Concourse, and BOSH all at once which would be a daunting task.

We suggest and document using BOSH to for two reasons:

BOSH is great at keeping processes and VMs running and healthy (it uses monit for processes and has a health monitor for vms), and is a great cloud lifecycle management tool for managing many deployments Internally on the team we have a lot of knowledge and support around BOSH, since it's a CF project and is also staffed by Pivotal ( we can literally walk over and ask the BOSH team questions if we're stuck ) For the first point, you're free to use other methods to keep the binaries up (the BOSH release and deployment aspect is just a lot of fancy-dancy magic around keeping a process up and the VM its running in up ) .. Chef, Puppet, whatevs. For the second point, BOSH has an infamously steep learning curve compared to other tools, but personally, having sweat through it, I think it's a worthwhile effort for the cloud lifecycle management niceties that BOSH provides.