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
- Horizontal and vertical worker scaling
- Vertical database scaling
- Workers reside behind a single, persistent public IP to simplify external security
- Easy destroy and cleanup
- Deploy to any AWS region
- View build metrics by accessing your Concourse URL on port 3000 using the same username and password as your Concourse admin username
- NAT gateway for outbound traffic
- DB encryption
- Self-update pipeline (paused by default)
Prerequisites
- Export the following environment variables before running
concourse-up
:
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
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://52.53.54.55 --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
--worker-size |
AWS Instance type |
medium |
t2.medium |
large |
m4.large |
xlarge |
m4.xlarge |
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
RDS Size Configuration
You can change the size of the RDS instance shared by BOSH and the Concourse using the --db-size
flag. eg:
$ concourse-up deploy --db-size medium chimichanga
Note that when changing the database size on an existing concourse-up deployment, the RDS instance will scaled by terraform resulting in approximately 3 minutes of downtime.
The following table shows the allowed database sizes and the corresponding AWS RDS instance types
--db-size |
AWS Instance type |
small |
db.t2.small |
medium |
db.t2.medium |
large |
db.m4.large |
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:
Component |
Size |
Count |
Price (USD) |
BOSH director |
t2.micro |
1 |
9.49 |
Web Server |
t2.small |
1 |
12.41 |
Worker |
m4.xlarge (spot) |
1 |
40.00 |
RDS instance |
db.t2.small |
1 |
28.47 |
NAT Gateway |
- |
1 |
35.04 |
gp2 storage |
20GB (bosh, web) |
2 |
4.40 |
gp2 storage |
220GB (worker) |
1 |
22.00 |
Total |
|
|
156.21 |
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:
- 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
- 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.micro instance, and then uses that to deploy a Concourse with the following settings:
- One t2.small for the Concourse web server
- One m4.xlarge spot instance used as a Concourse worker
- Access via 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!)