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. Some more recent features, including self-update, are described in this blog post.

Features

• Deploys the latest version of Concourse CI on AWS, without you having to know anything about BOSH
• Idempotent deployment with either manual upgrade or automatic self-upgrade
• 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
• Metrics infrastructure deployed by default (check http://your-concourse-url:3000)
• DB encryption turned on by default
• Uses credhub for secret management (see: https://concourse-ci.org/creds.html)

Prerequisites

• One of:
  • The environment variables AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY are set.
  • Credentials for the default profile in ~/.aws/credentials are present.
  • Credentials for a profile in ~/.aws/credentials are present.
• Ensure your credentials are long lived credentials and not temporary security credentials
• Ensure you have the correct local dependencies for bootstrapping a BOSH VM

Install

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

Usage

Deploy

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 --insecure --concourse-url https://10.0.0.0 --username  --password

Metrics available at https://10.0.0.0:3000 using the same username and password

Log into credhub with:
eval "$(concourse-up info ci --env)"

A new deploy from scratch takes approximately 20 minutes.

Flags

All flags are optional. Configuration settings provided via flags will persist in later deployments unless explicitly overriden.

• --region value AWS region (default: "eu-west-1") [$AWS_REGION]

• --domain value Domain to use as endpoint for Concourse web interface (eg: ci.myproject.com) [$DOMAIN]

  $ 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).

• --tls-cert value TLS cert to use with Concourse endpoint [$TLS_CERT]

• --tls-key value TLS private key to use with Concourse endpoint [$TLS_KEY]

  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

• --workers value Number of Concourse worker instances to deploy (default: 1) [$WORKERS]

• --worker-type Specify a worker type for aws (m5 or m4) (default: "m4") [$WORKER_TYPE] (see comparison table below). AWS does not offer m5 instances in all regions, and even for regions that do offer m5 instances, not all zones within that region may offer them. To complicate matters further, each AWS account is assigned AWS zones at random - for instance, eu-west-1a for one account may be the same as eu-west-1b in another account. If m5s are available in your chosen region but not the zone Concourse-Up has chosen, create a new deployment, this time specifying another --zone.

• --worker-size value Size of Concourse workers. Can be medium, large, xlarge, 2xlarge, 4xlarge, 10xlarge, 12xlarge, 16xlarge or 24xlarge depending on the worker-type (see above) (default: "xlarge") [$WORKER_SIZE]

  --worker-size	AWS m4 Instance type	AWS m5 Instance type*
  medium	t2.medium	t2.medium
  large	m4.large	m5.large
  xlarge	m4.xlarge	m5.xlarge
  2xlarge	m4.2xlarge	m5.2xlarge
  4xlarge	m4.4xlarge	m5.4xlarge
  10xlarge	m4.10xlarge
  12xlarge		m5.12xlarge
  16xlarge	m4.16xlarge
  24xlarge		m5.24xlarge

  * m5 instances not available in all regions and all zones. See --worker-type for more info.

• --web-size value Size of Concourse web node. Can be small, medium, large, xlarge, 2xlarge (default: "small") [$WEB_SIZE]

  --web-size	AWS Instance type
  small	t2.small
  medium	t2.medium
  large	t2.large
  xlarge	t2.xlarge
  2xlarge	t2.2xlarge

• --db-size value Size of Concourse RDS instance. Can be small, medium, large, xlarge, 2xlarge, or 4xlarge (default: "small") [$DB_SIZE]

  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
  xlarge	db.m4.xlarge
  2xlarge	db.m4.2xlarge
  4xlarge	db.m4.4xlarge

• --allow-ips value Comma separated list of IP addresses or CIDR ranges to allow access to (default: "0.0.0.0/0") [$ALLOW_IPS]

• --github-auth-client-id value Client ID for a github OAuth application - Used for Github Auth [$GITHUB_AUTH_CLIENT_ID]

• --github-auth-client-secret value Client Secret for a github OAuth application - Used for Github Auth [$GITHUB_AUTH_CLIENT_SECRET]

• --add-tag key=value Add a tag to the VMs that form your concourse-up deployment. Can be used multiple times in a single deploy command.

• --spot=value Use spot instances for workers. Can be true/false. Default is true.

  Concourse Up uses spot instances for workers as a cost saving measure. Users requiring lower risk may switch this feature off by setting --spot=false.

• --namespace value Any valid string that provides a meaningful namespace of the deployment - Used as part of the configuration bucket name [$NAMESPACE].

  Note that if namespace has been provided in the initial deploy it will be required for any subsequent concourse-up calls against the same deployment.

• --zone Specify an availability zone [$ZONE] (cannot be changed after the initial deployment)

Info

To fetch information about your concourse-up deployment:

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

To load credentials into your environment from your concourse-up deployment:

$ eval "$(concourse-up info <your-project-name> --env)"

Flags

All flags are optional

--region value AWS region (default: "eu-west-1") [$AWS_REGION] --json Output as json [$JSON] --env Output environment variables

Destroy

To destroy your Concourse:

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

Flags

All flags are optional

• --region value AWS region (default: "eu-west-1") [$AWS_REGION]

Self-update

When Concourse-up deploys Concourse, it now adds a pipeline to the new Concourse called concourse-up-self-update. This pipeline continuously monitors our Github repo for new releases and updates Concourse in place whenever a new version of Concourse-up comes out.

This pipeline is paused by default, so just unpause it in the UI to enable the feature.

Upgrading manually

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.

Metrics

Concourse-up now automatically deploys Influxdb, Riemann, and Grafana on the web node. You can access Grafana on port 3000 of your regular concourse URL using the same username and password as your Concourse admin user. We put in a default dashboard that tracks

• Build times
• CPU usage
• Containers
• Disk usage

Credential Management

Concourse-up deploys the credhub service alongside Concourse and configures Concourse to use it. More detail on how credhub integrates with Concourse can be found here. You can log into credhub by running $ eval "$(concourse-up info --env --region $region $deployment)".

Firewall

Concourse-up normally allows incoming traffic from any address to reach your web node. You can use the --allow-ips flag to add firewall rules to prevent this. For example to deploy Concourse-up and only allow traffic from your local machine, you could use the command concourse-up deploy --allow-ips $(dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com). --allow-ips takes a comma seperated list of IP addresses or CIDR ranges.

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.small	1	18.30
Web Server	t2.small	1	18.30
Worker	m4.xlarge (spot)	1	~50.00
RDS instance	db.t2.small	1	28.47
NAT Gateway	-	1	35.15
gp2 storage	20GB (bosh, web)	2	4.40
gp2 storage	200GB (worker)	1	22.00
Total			176.62

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:

Project

CI Pipeline (deployed with Concourse Up!)

Development

Pre-requisites

To build and test you'll need:

• Golang 1.10+
• to have installed github.com/mattn/go-bindata

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.

You will also need to clone concourse-up-ops to the same level as concourse-up to get the manifest and ops files necessary for building. Check the latest release of concourse-up for the appropriate tag of concourse-up-ops

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

Bumping Manifest/Ops File versions

The pipeline listens for new patch or minor versions of manifest.yml and ops/versions.json coming from the concourse-up-ops repo. In order to pick up a new major version first make sure it exists in the repo then modify tag_filter: X.*.* in the concourse-up-ops resource where X is the major version you want to pin to.