concourse-up

Concourse-Up

A tool for easily deploying Concourse in a single command.

TL;DR

$ AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<access-key-id> \
  AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<secret-access-key> \
  concourse-up deploy <your-project-name>

Why?

Concourse is easy to get started with, but as soon as you want your team to use it you've previously had to learn BOSH. Teams who just want great CI shouldn't need to think about this. The goal of concourse-up is to hide the complexity of BOSH, while giving you all the benefits, providing you with a single command for getting your Concourse up and keeping it running. You can read more about the rationale for this tool in this blog post.

Features

• Deploys the latest version of Concourse CI on AWS, without you having to know anything about BOSH
• Idempotent deployment and simple upgrade (get the latest release and just deploy again)
• Supports https access by default using a user-provided certificate or auto-generating a self-signed one
• Supports custom domains for your Concourse URL
• Uses cost effective AWS spot instances where possible (BOSH will take care of the service)
• Uses precompiled BOSH packages to minimise install time
• Workers are placed in a private subnet with NATted outbound traffic for easy firewall set up
• Horizontal and vertical worker scaling
• Easy destroy and cleanup
• Deploy to any AWS region

Prerequisites

• An authenticated AWS environment. This can be done by doing one of:
  • Installing the AWS CLI and running aws configure
  • Exporting the following environment variables before running concourse-up
    • AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
    • AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
• Terraform 0.9.3 or newer

Install

Download the latest release and install it into your $PATH:

Usage

Deploy a new Concourse with:

$ concourse-up deploy <your-project-name>

eg:

$ concourse-up deploy ci

...

DEPLOY SUCCESSFUL. Log in with:

fly --target ci login --concourse-url http://ci-concourse-up-1420669447.eu-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com --username admin --password abc123def456

A new deploy from scratch takes approximately 12 minutes.

To fetch information about your concourse-up deployment:

$ concourse-up info --json <your-project-name>

To destroy a Concourse:

$ concourse-up destroy <your-project-name>

That's it!

Region Configuration

By default concourse-up deploys the BOSH director and Concourse VMs into eu-west-1 region. To change the region, use the --region flag eg:

$ concourse-up deploy --region us-east-1 chimichanga

When deploying to a non-default region, you must pass the --region flag with all subsequent commands eg:

$ concourse-up info --region us-east-1 chimichanga
$ concourse-up destroy --region us-east-1 chimichanga

Worker Configuration

By default concourse-up deploys a single worker instance of the m4.xlarge type. To increase the number of workers pass in the --workers flag eg:

$ concourse-up deploy --workers 3 chimichanga

You can also change the size of each worker instance using the --worker-size flag. eg:

$ concourse-up deploy --worker-size xlarge chimichanga

The following table shows the allowed worker sizes and the corresponding AWS instance types

Custom Domains

You can use a custom domain using the --domain flag eg:

$ concourse-up deploy --domain chimichanga.engineerbetter.com chimichanga

In the example above concourse-up will search for a Route 53 hosted zone that matches chimichanga.engineerbetter.com or engineerbetter.com and add a record to the longest match (chimichanga.engineerbetter.com in this example).

By default concourse-up will generate a self-signed cert using the given domain. If you'd like to provide your own certificate instead, pass the cert and private key as strings using the --tls-cert and --tls-key flags respectively. eg:

$ concourse-up deploy \
  --domain chimichanga.engineerbetter.com \
  --tls-cert "$(cat chimichanga.engineerbetter.com.crt)" \
  --tls-key "$(cat chimichanga.engineerbetter.com.key)" \
  chimichanga

Upgrading your Concourse

Patch releases of concourse-up are compiled, tested and released automatically whenever a new stemcell or component release appears on bosh.io.

To upgrade your Concourse, grab the latest release and run concourse-up deploy <your-project-name> again.

Estimated Cost

By default, concourse-up deploys to the AWS eu-west-1 (Ireland) region, and uses spot instances for large and xlarge Concourse VMs. The estimated monthly cost is as follows:

What it does

concourse-up first creates an S3 bucket to store its own configuration and saves a config.json file there.

It then uses Terraform to deploy the following infrastructure:

• An elastic load balancer
• A VPC, with public and private subnets and routing
• A NAT gateway for outbound traffic from the private subnet
• An S3 bucket which BOSH uses as a blobstore
• An IAM user that can access the blobstore
• An IAM user that can deploy EC2 instances and update load balancers
• An AWS keypair for BOSH to use when deploying VMs
• An RDS instance (default: db.t2.small) for BOSH and Concourse to use
• Concourse database is encrypted by default
• A security group to allow access to the BOSH director from your local IP
• A security group for BOSH-deployed VMs
• A security group to allow access to the Concourse web server from the internet
• A security group to allow access to the RDS database from BOSH and it's VMs

Once the terraform step is complete, concourse-up deploys a BOSH director on an t2.medium instance, and then uses that to deploy a Concourse with the following settings:

• One t2.medium for the Concourse web server
• One m4.xlarge spot instance used as a Concourse worker
• Access via a load balancer over HTTP and HTTPS using a user-provided certificate, or an auto-generated self-signed certificate if one isn't provided.

Using a dedicated AWS IAM account

If you'd like to run concourse-up with it's own IAM account, create a user with the following permissions:

Tests

Tests use the Ginkgo Go testing framework. The tests require you to have set up AWS authentication locally.

Install ginkgo and run the tests with:

$ go get github.com/onsi/ginkgo/ginkgo
$ ginkgo -r

Building locally

concourse-up uses golang compile-time variables to set the release versions it uses. To build locally use the build_local.sh script, rather than running go build.

Project

Pivotal Tracker

CI Pipeline (deployed with Concourse Up!)