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0 pointsmugsie8y ago0 comments

Booting VMs is kind of the main one.

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Booting VMs on your worker seems like exactly the kind of debris concourse is encouraging the avoidance of by enforcing the containerisation of your builds. That said, I can't think of a reason why you couldn't boot a VM in a privileged Garden container, have you tried?

mugsieOP8y ago

Yeah - I can't remember the actual failure, but it did not work out well.

We also need the VMs to survive across build steps.

We are working on an P/IaaS - so integration testing requires actually booting a full stack, then running an install, then testing the resultant servers are actually running Kubernetes

wlamartin8y ago

Ah that's a shame, I still suspect it would _probably_ work with the right tweaking but I appreciate there's a hurdle there that might be frustrating to overcome and that's no good.

We also test a PaaS and require VM spin up but we call out to GCP/AWS as necessary.

jacques_chester8y ago

> We also need the VMs to survive across build steps.

You might represent them as a pool resource, so they can be safely handed from job to job. A lot of teams do this for stuff where they want to share an expensive, long-lived, stateful resource.

Disclosure: I work at Pivotal.

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smgoller8y ago

I second what wlamartin said. We have pipelines that do integration tests that spin up 30 instance clusters in AWS. Trying to spin up something similar inside a concourse worker just isn't worth trying.

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wlamartin8y ago

mugsieOP8y ago

Yeah - I can't remember the actual failure, but it did not work out well.

We also need the VMs to survive across build steps.

We are working on an P/IaaS - so integration testing requires actually booting a full stack, then running an install, then testing the resultant servers are actually running Kubernetes

wlamartin8y ago

Ah that's a shame, I still suspect it would _probably_ work with the right tweaking but I appreciate there's a hurdle there that might be frustrating to overcome and that's no good.

We also test a PaaS and require VM spin up but we call out to GCP/AWS as necessary.

jacques_chester8y ago

> We also need the VMs to survive across build steps.

You might represent them as a pool resource, so they can be safely handed from job to job. A lot of teams do this for stuff where they want to share an expensive, long-lived, stateful resource.

Disclosure: I work at Pivotal.

1 more reply

smgoller8y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse