Concourse Update (🤷-April 1, 2019)

Phew, it’s been a while since I last wrote an update. For some background behind why I slowed down, hop on over to this thread on our forms: “What would you like to see on our blog”.

That said, I do have a lot of interesting updates to share, so let’s get started

Concourse 5.0.0

In case you missed it, Concourse 5.0.0 and 5.0.1 came out a few weeks ago in March. This is a major version release with tons of new features, including:

Role Based Access Control
Global Resource Cache
fewest-build-containers placement strategy
Resource pinning
Inputs on the put step of a pipeline
UI tweaks
and much much more!

Be warned, there are some breaking changes in this release as well; so make sure you read all of the release notes before you upgrade!

You’ll also notice that we recently gave the Concourse homepage a small makeover as well. We’ve tightened up the navigation and expanded some sections of our docs, check it out:

Expanded docs onCredential Management with Vault and AWS SSM
More info on the new Container Placement strategies
A primer on the new Global Resources feature
Our spiffy new Examples section, which gives you a side-by-side comparison of a pipeline and the yml that made it

Interesting Blog Posts

There’s also been some interesting blog posts about Concourse from around the interwebs…and not all of them were written by me!

An Overview of Authorization in Concourse 3, 4 and 5 is a useful overview of auth across 3 major versions of Concourse
Installing Concourse 5.0 on Kubernetes using Helm is a great two-part overview of getting PKS installed and using the Concourse helm chart
Building Go code, with and without Go modules, with Concourse
Aptomi described how to do CI/CD for Knative serverless apps on Kubernetes with Concourse
Concourse-Up is now renamed to “Control Tower”
Someone compared us to Drone.io in CI/CD tool showdown pits adoptability vs. adaptability
We got a mention on PorscheDev’s Technology Radar vol 2 (I think they like us :D)

Concourse Swag

We have swag! With the help of the team at Pivotal we’ve listed our first Concourse-branded sweater under the official Pivotal apparel store. A few notes:

The sweaters themselves are listed at-cost, so we’re not making any profit off of them
Apologies to anyone who’s not in the United States because international shipping through this store is atrocious. We’re going to be working with our partners to see if we can find a better shipping solution.
At the time of this writing we’re relatively low on M and L sweaters, there’s a new shipment of those sizes coming in soon so the store should be updated in a week or so
Once this batch of sweaters sell out we’ll be planning on doing new designs to keep things fresh!

Concourse IRL

The Concourse team will be attending CF Summit NA 2019 this week in Philadelphia, so come by the Pivotal booth and say hi to the team!

I’ll also be attending the ConcourseCI Bay Area User Group meetup on April 11th in Palo Alto. The title of the meetup is “Kubernetes Deployments with Concourse CI and Spinnaker”. Come check it out if you’re in the Bay Area!

Milestones and Interesting RFCs

Alex Suraci has been experimenting with re-organizing our backlog of epics by using the GitHub Projects feature. You can see our current list of epics in the concourse/concourse project list. The big things we’re working on are:

Spatial Resource
API refactoring
Ephemeral check containers (Runtime)
and Concourse + K8s runtime

On the topic of k8s runtime situation, please take a second to review Topher Bullock’s new RFC #22 How Do We Best Leverage K8s as Runtime?. The team is evaluating Concourse + Tekton CD vs Concourse + K8s our own way.

Thanks to our Community 🙏

Finally, I wanted to give shout-outs to our growing community of Concourse fans and followers. In early 2019 the Concourse team made two changes to our contributor workflow: we switched over to a looser Contributors License Agreement (CLA) and the core team moved towards a PR-based workflow. Since then, we’ve seen a lot more engagement on the work that we’ve doing, and we’ve also started to see a lot of new PRs coming in!

# of PRs opened over time against concourse/concourse and other key resources

In 2018, we saw 263 PRs opened against concourse/concourse and its core resources. As of today we already have more than 160 PRs opened by non-Pivots! Some notable PRs that I wanted to

The Future of Weekly Updates

I’ll do my best to resume the weekly cadence of the project updates. In the meantime, if you have any specific opinions on what kind of blog posts we should right, I’d suggest you check out this thread on our forums: “What would you like to see on our blog”