What does it take to run Concourse? The tl;dr here is that in order to run Concourse for one or more teams, you will need: A secrets manager (e.g. Vault) A container registry (e.g. Harbor) Let’s dig into why you need these two types of applications if you choose to run Concourse. A Secrets Manager # Secrets managers, like Vault, securely store your secrets. Setup correctly, you can trust them to safely store and retrieve your secrets.

Writing Concourse resource-types in bash can be fairly fast, especially if you’re relying on external tools to do some of the heavy lifting for you. I think a lot of us in this space are also use to do writing up quick bash scripts to do things, so writing up a quick and dirty resource-type in bash feels natural. Here are some tips for writing resource-types in bash. I’m not going to explain how resource-types work in Concourse.

I’m currently running Concourse for my team at work. It’s a two instance deployment, one web and one worker EC2 instance. Most of the pipelines we write do stuff that require permissions to various AWS services. We needed to figure out a way to grant permissions to these AWS services to our pipelines. Our first thought was to create an IAM role and assign that role to the Concourse Worker’s EC2 instance.

A request I’ve seen from Concourse users every so often is that they want a way for a Concourse Job to stop what it’s doing and wait for approval from a human. They want what I call a “manual approval” step in their jobs. A more concrete example that I’ve seen is when users are running terraform apply in their pipelines. They usually end up wanting a Concourse Job that looks like:

When I got my first mechanical keyboard one of the first thing I did was create a layer where h,j,k, and l, Vim’s navigation keys, sent their respective arrow key codes instead. This quickly became one of my favourite key bindings that I would use everywhere. I’ve continued to code this setup into any keyboard I can set it up on. With mechanical keyboards this is easy since most come with great programmable tools out of the box.

I’ve been reading So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. I first heard of this book a few years ago from a podcast and it’s been on my reading list ever since. I’ve entered a soul searching mode recently in regards to my career. I’m trying to figure out where I want my career to go. This is a pretty big question and I’ve been finding the advice in this book pretty good for someone in my position.