I was interviewed by one of the Concourse authors when i applied to Pivotal; probably the same one, given that you seem to be in London. I think Concourse is a huge step in the right direction for CI, and we've used it on a few projects, but last time we did, a few months ago, it struck me as not quite ready for prime time yet.
I've just bothered to chase pointers to find out who you are, and yes, indeed you were. We overlapped by the best part of a year, i think, but never had much cause to interact.
Alex Suraci was working less than 50M from Dmitry Kalinin when Concourse was born and put to work on the Diego team. So in a way it comes as no surprise.
Both of the founders were Cloud Foundry developers, and so had undergone thorough BOSH indoctrination. You can absolutely see that Concourse comes from the same philosophy as Cloud Foundry itself; it's virtually an answer to the question "what would a PaaS for CI look like"?
Agreed on both points. I find it interesting that the properties of Bosh are clear strengths when present in other systems; if what Bosh does is so intrinsically good, why didn't it take over the world? Because it's a PITA to use.
That's meant more of a musing than a passive-aggressive complaint BTW. As someone that's scaled the "Bosh learning cliff" I'd like to see it used more widely.
How about taking what's good about BOSH and carrying that forward into something better? What could be added to Terraform or PaaSTA or something to make it as good as BOSH?
Terraform's model (local state files) is not something that works well, in my opinion. Since AWS doesn't know that you want some operations done "transactionally" (like with CloudFormation), you can easily end up with a half built env that needs to be cleaned up. PaaSTa is more of a CF competitor, as far as I know, not really at the same abstraction level. I think that it would be a lot easier to clean up the UX/marketing of BOSH than doing the opposite.
Have you looked at bosh.io? It's being actively worked on by our designers and engineers, I bet that feedback would be welcome. If you email me I can put you in touch with them.
