Support for non-container workloads

[gtirloni]

It would be nice if Concourse could run tests outside containers (which seem the main focus right now).

As an example, we have a Jenkins server that connects to a slave and starts a custom-built Vagrant VM that runs tests on GNOME 3 and other desktop environments (e.g. Windows). Sometimes these tests must be able to perform certain things that only exist in a Virtual Machine or even a proper Desktop computer (e.g. audio).

Since Concourse relies on Garden heavily, and Garden seems to work exclusively with workers, it's not clear how to migrate our CI pipeline to Concourse.

[gtirloni]

Just realized I opened this issue in the 'atc' repository. If it should be closed and opened again in the 'concourse' repository, please let me know.

[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:

• #116570685 Support for non-container workloads

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

[Tankanow]

+1
Concourse truly seems like the best CD tool out there, unfortunately, I too don't see a clear path to migrate to concourse without access directly to the worker OS. We have moved heavily to docker-compose, providing a nice parity between local development and cluster deployment. I'm sure I'm missing something here but I don't see a clear way in concourse for docker-compose, using docker natively, or for testing an application packaged inside a docker image, which I think should mean starting a container from that image and testing the interface. Like most, we maintain parity with packer so our platforms hosting workers are already reproducible environments mitigating the need for tasks to run inside containers.

[vito]

This is already abstracted away by Garden. You're free to use a no-op backend like Houdini instead of a "real" backend.