Implementing sustainable continuous delivery pipelines that can build and deploy production software across multiple environments requires a tool that treats build pipelines and artifacts as first-class citizens. When we first started assessing Concourse, we liked its simple and flexible model, the principle of container-based builds and the fact that it forces you to define pipelines as code. Since then, the usability has improved, and the simple model has stood the test of time. Many of our teams and clients have successfully been using Concourse for large pipeline setups over longer periods of time. We also often leverage Concourse's flexibility to run workers anywhere, for example, when hardware integration tests require a local setup.
Many development teams are making the move from simple continuous integration servers to Continuous Delivery pipelines, often spanning multiple environments, reaching into production. To implement such a pipeline successfully and operate it in a sustainable way requires a CI/CD tool that treats build pipelines and artifacts as first-class citizens; and unfortunately there aren’t many. Concourse CI is a promising new entrant in this field, and our teams that have tried it are excited about its setup, which enables builds that run in containers, has a clean, usable UI and discourages snowflake build servers.
