We currently have a Jenkins setup and recently looked into both Concourse CI and GoCD as candidates for a change.
We decided not go with Concourse, because it has a complex setup with bosh. Not much other use cases are really covered in the docs other than a simple one machine setup so you are left to figure things out on your own (don't really have the time to go into all that, jenkins + ec2 plugin is very simple and just works). Also the minimal GUI, very CLI-centric. this is more of a particular thing, since I don't think that our current team will be comfortable with that UX and we have to weight this in.
We did like the docker-centric approach and specially the postgres backend that makes for a much more flexible maintenance story.
We decided not to go with GoCD simply because it feels very similar to jenkins in several aspects, but all concepts and workflow are different so we would have to relearn all that we do in jenkins in the GoCD way. Also redo all ops involved in backup, update etc. I just didn't find the killer feature to justify going through it. The postgres backend would maybe have caught my attention if it wasn't offered as an add-on for the expensive paid version.
In the end just decided to leverage more of Jenkins 2.x pipelines with shared libs instead of having independently configured jobs that are bothersome to maintain. Will probably make some changes to our agents to leverage more of docker instead of messing with AMIs.
Another major factor is the size of community, which alleviates a lot of worries.
As for Blue Ocean, I hope it evolves in the right direction, but right now it simply does not solve any problems for us. As said somewhere else, you can't build a pipeline with parameters. This is really a show stopper, parameterized builds are central to a lot jenkins use cases. Another problem is a single view for all jobs but no filter? The favorite jobs feature does not substitute either search or the view and folder way.
Are there any other missing gaps you think are important? I'm keen to get them solved :)
EDIT: I missed the comment regarding search and that is something we are working on. I hope to have a design up for it on https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/browse/JENKINS-38982 in early January and we believe it should be quick for us to ship.
A note on concourse deployment: their docs recommend bosh deployments, but they also provide standalone binaries [0] and the deployment workflow in this case is extremely simple. Run "concourse web" for the UI, "concourse worker" for a worker, and all the basic connectivity stuff is handled via command line parameters.
That being said, depending on your company habits, the fact that concourse is very opinionated on how to run the jobs (every is built around docker) and how configuration is done (yaml files, no UI) can be either a blessing or a showstopper.
> the deployment workflow in this case is extremely simple. Run "concourse web" for the UI, "concourse worker" for a worker
By which you mean, of course, "write systemd units or whatever for the web and worker jobs", because you don't want to be starting your CI system by hand. That's not rocket science, but it's not quite out of the box.
That said, the emphasis on BOSH must really be hurting Concourse adoption. Nobody outside the Cloud Foundry bubble (which includes Pivotal) has any interest in using BOSH at all, and honestly, quite rightly so. It's cool there's a BOSH option for fans, but the primary deployment option has to be something accessible by the general public.
> That said, the emphasis on BOSH must really be hurting Concourse adoption.
It did, I think. My gut feel from watching the Slack chat is that lots of people are deploying using the prebuilt docker containers. There are even projects that set up k8s clusters for you.
Whoa... GoCD is a major superset of what Jenkins (or anyone else) provides! Pipelines are first-class constructs - beyond the visual representation and the Value Stream Map. There is full end-to-end audit-ability and traceability, you don't have to resort to any hacks to mix 'n match components.
Do contact the community on the GoCD mailing list to understand what it takes to migrate from Jenkins to GoCD.
Meanwhile, please also check https://build.go.cd/ (user -> view, password -> password) to understand some of what's possible.
We decided not go with Concourse, because it has a complex setup with bosh. Not much other use cases are really covered in the docs other than a simple one machine setup so you are left to figure things out on your own (don't really have the time to go into all that, jenkins + ec2 plugin is very simple and just works). Also the minimal GUI, very CLI-centric. this is more of a particular thing, since I don't think that our current team will be comfortable with that UX and we have to weight this in.
We did like the docker-centric approach and specially the postgres backend that makes for a much more flexible maintenance story.
We decided not to go with GoCD simply because it feels very similar to jenkins in several aspects, but all concepts and workflow are different so we would have to relearn all that we do in jenkins in the GoCD way. Also redo all ops involved in backup, update etc. I just didn't find the killer feature to justify going through it. The postgres backend would maybe have caught my attention if it wasn't offered as an add-on for the expensive paid version.
In the end just decided to leverage more of Jenkins 2.x pipelines with shared libs instead of having independently configured jobs that are bothersome to maintain. Will probably make some changes to our agents to leverage more of docker instead of messing with AMIs.
Another major factor is the size of community, which alleviates a lot of worries.
As for Blue Ocean, I hope it evolves in the right direction, but right now it simply does not solve any problems for us. As said somewhere else, you can't build a pipeline with parameters. This is really a show stopper, parameterized builds are central to a lot jenkins use cases. Another problem is a single view for all jobs but no filter? The favorite jobs feature does not substitute either search or the view and folder way.