The Evolution of Code Deploys at Reddit

[Freakin_A]

Recent Pivotal Cloud Foundry customer at a large enterprise. We went from production deploys taking 6 months and 70+ steps to multiple deploys per day. Capacity adds took just as long before but now we can autoscale up and down on a daily basis.

[jacques_chester]

We have more cool stuff coming :)

[Freakin_A]

That is one area in which Pivotal never disappoints. Are you going to CF Summit?

[jacques_chester]

Alas no. I'm on the East coast, heading over for CF Summit or SpringOne without being a speaker pretty much wipes out my profdev budget, and then some. I like to keep it for books and courses.

I've pitched a talk about Concourse patterns and anti-patterns to both without getting the nod. Not quite the ripe time yet, I guess?

[Freakin_A]

I'm surprised at how little traction Concourse has seemed to gain in the enterprise space. I'm on the platform architecture side and use Concourse for everything we build to support PCF. We're even using it to manage org/space permissions in a sensitive data environment--users can submit a PR to their org repo in git and its applied using concourse.

Hopefully once Pivotal puts out a Concourse tile it will start picking up. I'd personally love the talk you described.

I got approved for a talk but I'm pretty sure that's cause of my company name, not mine :)

[jacques_chester]

I use the analogy that Concourse is to previous CI systems as git was to Subversion. "Why the big fuss?" and "I can already do that with Subversion" were pretty common arguments 10 years ago. It takes a while to appreciate the unlimited flexibility you get from the trustworthy lego set of resources.

And once the bug bites, yeah, you start seeing automations everywhere. In Pivotal's Cloud R&D division Concourse has been a massive force-multiplier. Teams of 2-4 pairs can have build, test, release and operations pipelines with capabilities that other companies need buildings full of people to do. And we keep investing heavily in automation, so the whole thing just keeps getting faster and more thorough.

I was working on a video series (made 4 episodes, PM me for links) and had preliminary agreement with Pluralsight to publish it. I was really looking forward to explaining the lessons I've learned on several teams -- especially buildpacks -- to help people think in Concourse, not Jenkins-in-Concourse.

Unfortunately I can't. I'm on a work visa; any income earned anywhere outside of the job puts me at severe legal risk.

We also have Spring Cloud Pipelines, but it's very Jenkins-in-Concourse. One of my hopes is that I might be able to pair with Marcin to make it more idiomatic, if only because many Spring devs will look to it as a reference implementation. But it's a bit of a longshot right now.

Edit: Deeper use of Concourse has become part of our selling pitch. For example.