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Comment by twic | Hacker News Reader

I was interviewed by one of the Concourse authors when i applied to Pivotal; probably the same one, given that you seem to be in London. I think Concourse is a huge step in the right direction for CI, and we've used it on a few projects, but last time we did, a few months ago, it struck me as not quite ready for prime time yet.

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Ha - if it was in 2014, I was probably in the office!

I don't think it's hit version 1.0 yet, which would explain its rough edges. I find it interesting that it shares a lot of philosophies with Bosh.

Alex Suraci was working less than 50M from Dmitry Kalinin when Concourse was born and put to work on the Diego team. So in a way it comes as no surprise.

Both of the founders were Cloud Foundry developers, and so had undergone thorough BOSH indoctrination. You can absolutely see that Concourse comes from the same philosophy as Cloud Foundry itself; it's virtually an answer to the question "what would a PaaS for CI look like"?

Agreed on both points. I find it interesting that the properties of Bosh are clear strengths when present in other systems; if what Bosh does is so intrinsically good, why didn't it take over the world? Because it's a PITA to use.

That's meant more of a musing than a passive-aggressive complaint BTW. As someone that's scaled the "Bosh learning cliff" I'd like to see it used more widely.

How about taking what's good about BOSH and carrying that forward into something better? What could be added to Terraform or PaaSTA or something to make it as good as BOSH?

Terraform's model (local state files) is not something that works well, in my opinion. Since AWS doesn't know that you want some operations done "transactionally" (like with CloudFormation), you can easily end up with a half built env that needs to be cleaned up. PaaSTa is more of a CF competitor, as far as I know, not really at the same abstraction level. I think that it would be a lot easier to clean up the UX/marketing of BOSH than doing the opposite.

Have you looked at bosh.io? It's being actively worked on by our designers and engineers, I bet that feedback would be welcome. If you email me I can put you in touch with them.

I've just bothered to chase pointers to find out who you are, and yes, indeed you were. We overlapped by the best part of a year, i think, but never had much cause to interact.

It's come a long way in the last six months. Pivotal have devoted a team of 3 or 4 pairs to it, so progress is at a fast clip now.

Almost every team in Cloud Foundry has switched to using it and some projects out of Pivotal Labs are tinkering with it too.

I think that once the resources ecosystem grows and it becomes more approachable for beginners, Concourse has massive potential.

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