Playing with ConcourseCI via a Google Cloud Platform free trial

I’ve started a practice of spending a couple of hours each weekend honing and growing my skills as a software developer. This weekend’s lesson was deploying my own ConcourseCI cluster to Google Compute Platform via the Bosh Google CPI.

I’m guessing that everyone knows about Amazon’s cloud computing platform called Amazon Web Services, AWS for short. Until recently, I hadn’t realized that Google had a competing platform called Google Compute Platform, GCP for short. One thing I like about GCP over AWS is the pricing model. Where AWS charges you for full hours of usage, GCP charges by the minute after a minimum of 10 minutes. Not to mention $300 free trial for 60 days.

Lucky for me, the folks at Google have done a great job documenting the procedure for installing Concourse to GCP.

Here are some of the tweaks I had to make to the above instructions to make it fit into the free plan (latest version numbers may be different by the time you read this post):

1. On step #8 of Deploying BOSH director, change the resource_pools -> cloud_properties -> machine_type from n1-standard-4 to n1-standard-1 in the manifest.yml file. You are capped at 8 CPUs per region so using 4 of them for you BOSH director eats up a lot of capacity and will make the install fail later. This will slow down the installation and later updates of the director. You can always change this later after you switch off of the free trial.
2. Also in step #8 of Deploying BOSH director, update to the latest versions of BOSH(257.15), the Google CPI(25.4.1) and the Google stemcell(3263.7) releases. The older ones will work but why not get all of the latest goodness while you are setting things up.
3. On step #1 of Deploy Concourse, upload the latest version of the Google stemcell(3263.7).
4. On step #2 of Deploy Concourse, upload the latest versions of Concourse (2.3.1) and Garden RunC (0.9.2). These versions are tied together so check the Concourse downloads page for the latest.
5. On step #3 of Deploy Concourse, make sure you again change the machine_type to n1-standard-1 in cloud-config.yml to fit in under the CPU quota. Since this is a demo environment, you may not need the additional horsepower. You can always change it back and re-deploy when your free trial ends. That’s the beauty of BOSH. :-)
6. On step #4 of Deploy Concourse, change the basic_auth_password in concourse.yml to something a bit more complex. You wouldn’t want “hackers” poking around in your Concourse environment. :-)

And that’s it. Following the directions with these minor tweaks should get you up and running quickly with your own GCP based Concourse installation.

If you are looking for tutorials to help you learn Concourse, check out the Concourse tutorials page. The flight school example is a great way to get started. You can check out my running version here: http://107.178.255.195/