Improve documentation on Concourse's requirements

[rafaelmagu]

Following on from a conversation in the Slack channel, I have found that trying to set up a VPC from scratch to use Concourse is nearly impossible. Considering BOSH's documentation covers the basics, I'd expect Concourse's to be even simpler.

It seems to basically consist of:

• 2 security groups
• 1 ELB
• 1 route table
• 1 NAT instance
• 2 subnets

While I understand the CloudFormation template provided works great for spinning up infra, it does very little to explain what the infrastructure requirements actually are for Concourse. This is made worse by the fact there is virtually zero documentation on how to set Concourse's individual components up.

Importing a third-party CF template into an AWS production account is almost never a good idea, for security reasons. A list of Concourse requirements for the VPC on top of BOSH's would go a long way in demystifying Concourse's setup.

[concourse-bot]

Hi there!

We use Pivotal Tracker to provide visibility into what our team is working on. A story for this issue has been automatically created.

The current status is as follows:

• #110642434 Improve documentation on Concourse's requirements

This comment, as well as the labels on the issue, will be automatically updated as the status in Tracker changes.

[mavenraven]

@rafaelmagu Would making a separate AWS account to spin up Concourse in solve your security concerns? What information are you looking for that is isn't in the Cloud Formation template?

[rafaelmagu]

CloudFormation templates are not the most human-friendly documents around. What I am missing here (and basically anywhere in the docs) is the actual list of resources that will be setup when I import this CloudFormation template into AWS.

Or, basically, an answer to the question "what resources does Concourse need?"

[mavenraven]

Looking at that slack conversation, I'd agree with @robdimsdale. The bosh.io AWS docs have had subtle things wrong in the past that made them incorrect. A terraform configuration would be cool though.

[rafaelmagu]

Pipe dream would be to be able to deploy just the binaries onto any setup you want, without relying on BOSH. But yeah, Terraform would simplify understanding a little bit. As it is right now, because I'm a noob with BOSH, getting those templates right seems to be taking too much time, so I'm back to using CF.

[rafaelmagu]

Is there a diagram available anywhere that explains the information flows between the multiple Concourse components?

[vito]

Is this addressed in any way now that 1.0 and its binaries are out?:

https://concourse.ci/binaries.html
https://concourse.ci/architecture.html

[rafaelmagu]

Yes, it is much clearer now. 👍