challiwill

There is a simple 'vagrant up' you can do that allows you to play with Concourse without needing to learn about all the other tooling such as BOSH. It's a great way to get started. Take a look:

Check out VM setup here: http://concourse.ci/vagrant.html Setting up first pipeline here: http://concourse.ci/using-concourse.html

This gets you going with a local Concourse instance that you can experiment with. You're right that it can feel like "turtles all the way down" (quoting @oblio from earlier today), but you do not need to jump in with BOSH right away.

In regards to how to think about 'job' vs 'task', I like to think of 'Job's as a description of what the module is attempting to achieve. For example in the Concourse team's own pipeline[1] you'll see a 'job' named "deploy". 'Task's are on the other hand the individual things that need to happen in order to complete the 'job'.

-- 1. http://ci.concourse.ci/

I'm not familiar with Buildbot, but the benefit you're describing I think exists in Concourse as well. When you define a task you can just point it to a script to run. This can be a script written in a higher level language if you'd like.

This is similar to how some Concourse Resources are implemented with Shell[1] scripts, and some in Go[2]. -- 1. https://github.com/concourse/git-resource 2. https://github.com/concourse/tracker-resource