Concourse Update (Feb 12–16)

February 16, 2018

If you haven’t heard the news by now, we released Concourse v3.9.0 this week 🎉🎉🎉! Two of the top-line features in this release are:

• Concourse will now automatically propagate certificates from the worker machine into resource containers (GH issue #1027)
• Improved btrfs volume driver stability. So if you’re getting hit hard by overlay weirdness, I’d suggest you give the btrfs driver another shot!

To find out what else we’ve packed into this release, I’d encourage you to read the full release notes on the concourse.ci/downloads page!

On to the update…

Features

UX

• Started to look at slow page-load times on the web-ui. The team identified that a large source of the pain came when we introduced timestamps last year. We’ve since been able to drastically improve the load times on that page GH issue 1912

Runtime

• As I mentioned last week, the Concourse team runs a relatively large installation of Concourse that is used by Pivotal employees for internal projects. As a result of running this giant Concourse, we’ve discovered that our Garbage Collector needs significant improvement in order to keep up with the workloads that we’ve been observing. GH issue #2016 has been consuming a lot of our thoughts and feelings this week.

Core

• Same as last week: continued breaking out our backend auth systems to use Dex #1888, (see #1886for additional background)
• ^^ Refactoring our complex backend to support individual auth is going to take some time, and we recognize that :)

Design Research

We’ve picked up design research work on Spatial Resources again. Lindsay Auchinachie and Sam Peinado are currently exploring different ways to visualize the (potentially) dense permutations and combinations of work.