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Add to SafariWhen comparing Rancher vs Concourse CI, the Slant community recommends Concourse CI for most people. In the question“What are the best Continuous Integration services with Docker support?” Concourse CI is ranked 9th while Rancher is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Concourse CI is:
Debugging on remote build agents is a nightmare (especially without isolated builds). Concourse CI can be run locally. When there are problems with the pipeline definition, it can be run and debugged locally. That means it takes less time to find and fix problems.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Web GUI cluster management
Intuitive and easy to use web gui.
Pro Mult-environment cluster system
- Cattle (Rancher default)
- Swarm
- Kubernetes
- Mesos
Pro Service catalog is easy
Rancher provides a catalog of application templates that make it easy to deploy complex stacks.
- Rancher certified catalog
- Community service catalog
Pro Self-service application stack for self-monitoring
Great contributions from the co community who build the service stack catalog.
One of them is the "Prometheus" template which deploys a collection of containers for monitoring a platform. It's capable of querying all aspects of your environment with some nice pre-built dashboards.
Pro Access control polices
Detailed role-based access control policies can be defined independently for each cluster.
Pro Local iteration
Debugging on remote build agents is a nightmare (especially without isolated builds). Concourse CI can be run locally. When there are problems with the pipeline definition, it can be run and debugged locally. That means it takes less time to find and fix problems.
Pro Flexible
Resources are to Concourse as plugins are to Jenkins. In other words, resources allow Concourse CI to do just about any work necessary in a build. But resources follow a "service provider interface" that makes them easy to build in any language (not just JVM languages) and have a clearly defined computing model, built for composition. Resources don't clutter UI or tax performance.
Pro Scalable, reproducible deployment
BOSH is an open source tool for release engineering, deployment, lifecycle management, and monitoring of distributed systems. Since Concourse CI is built on top of BOSH, Concourse can scale across many servers or be run in the Cloud.
Pro Isolated builds
Build isolation keeps workers "clean". There's no configuration drift of agents. Or flaky interactions between build jobs.
Pro Usable
Visual pipeline view makes it clear what the automation does. Simple navigation to logs makes it easy to understand what happened in a build.
Pro Simple
Concourse defines three primitives that, together, can express arbitrary features and pipelines.
Cons
Con Limited infrastructure options
The downside of building on BOSH is that a full, scalable deployment of Concourse CI requires AWS, vSphere, or OpenStack. If you don't already have these, any one of them can be a big effort to set up, just to get a build server running. Might not be a good fit for smaller teams.
