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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Build Automation
  4. Infrastructure Build Tools
  5. Concourse vs Packer

Concourse vs Packer

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Packer
Packer
Stacks575
Followers566
Votes41
Concourse
Concourse
Stacks254
Followers393
Votes54
GitHub Stars7.6K
Forks870

Concourse vs Packer: What are the differences?

Concourse: Pipeline-based CI system written in Go. Concourse's principles reduce the risk of switching to and from Concourse, by encouraging practices that decouple your project from your CI's little details, and keeping all configuration in declarative files that can be checked into version control; Packer: Create identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

Concourse and Packer are primarily classified as "Continuous Integration" and "Infrastructure Build" tools respectively.

"Real pipelines" is the top reason why over 8 developers like Concourse, while over 24 developers mention "Cross platform builds" as the leading cause for choosing Packer.

Concourse and Packer are both open source tools. Packer with 9.03K GitHub stars and 2.46K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Concourse with 3.92K GitHub stars and 472 GitHub forks.

Conceptboard, Instacart, and SendGrid are some of the popular companies that use Packer, whereas Concourse is used by Starbucks, DigitalOcean, and HelloFresh. Packer has a broader approval, being mentioned in 113 company stacks & 20 developers stacks; compared to Concourse, which is listed in 18 company stacks and 17 developer stacks.

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Advice on Packer, Concourse

veera
veera

Jan 27, 2020

Needs advice

I'm planning to setup complete CD-CD setup for spark and python application which we are going to deploy in aws lambda and EMR Cluster. Which tool would be best one to choose. Since my company is trying to adopt to concourse i would like to understand what are the lack of capabilities concourse have . Thanks in advance !

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Packer
Packer
Concourse
Concourse

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

Concourse's principles reduce the risk of switching to and from Concourse, by encouraging practices that decouple your project from your CI's little details, and keeping all configuration in declarative files that can be checked into version control.

Super fast infrastructure deployment. Packer images allow you to launch completely provisioned and configured machines in seconds, rather than several minutes or hours.;Multi-provider portability. Because Packer creates identical images for multiple platforms, you can run production in AWS, staging/QA in a private cloud like OpenStack, and development in desktop virtualization solutions such as VMware or VirtualBox.;Improved stability. Packer installs and configures all the software for a machine at the time the image is built. If there are bugs in these scripts, they'll be caught early, rather than several minutes after a machine is launched.;Greater testability. After a machine image is built, that machine image can be quickly launched and smoke tested to verify that things appear to be working. If they are, you can be confident that any other machines launched from that image will function properly.
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Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
7.6K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
870
Stacks
575
Stacks
254
Followers
566
Followers
393
Votes
41
Votes
54
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 27
    Cross platform builds
  • 8
    Vm creation automation
  • 4
    Bake in security
  • 1
    Good documentation
  • 1
    Easy to use
Pros
  • 16
    Real pipelines
  • 10
    Containerised builds
  • 9
    Flexible engine
  • 6
    Fast
  • 4
    Open source
Cons
  • 2
    Fail forward instead of rollback pattern
Integrations
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean
Docker
Docker
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
OpenStack
OpenStack
VirtualBox
VirtualBox
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Packer, Concourse?

Jenkins

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Travis CI

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

CircleCI

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

TeamCity

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

wercker

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

GoCD

GoCD

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers business a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility.

Shippable

Shippable

Shippable is a SaaS platform that lets you easily add Continuous Integration/Deployment to your Github and BitBucket repositories. It is lightweight, super simple to setup, and runs your builds and tests faster than any other service.

Buildkite

Buildkite

CI and build automation tool that combines the power of your own build infrastructure with the convenience of a managed, centralized web UI. Used by Shopify, Basecamp, Digital Ocean, Venmo, Cochlear, Bugsnag and more.

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