Concourse All of the Things at All Times - Jason Immerman, Zipcar & Derek Van Assche, HS2 Solutions
Channel: Cloud Foundry
Date: 27/04/2018

Concourse All of the Things at All Times - Jason Immerman, Zipcar & Derek Van Assche, HS2 Solutions

How do large engineering organisations build reliable and well-defined processes to help dev teams get their work to production?

Zipcar answered this question by replacing a patchwork of semi-automated and manual testing, approval and deployment processes with a series of autonomous pipelines powered by the powerful and supremely flexible continuous integration/delivery system "Concourse".

Concourse allowed Zipcar to move from a tightly controlled weekly release cycle to a loose peer-reviewed process allowing 100+ applications to be tested, integrated and deployed on a continuous basis.

This presentation will focus on the real world experience of automating creation of well-tested deployable artifacts (in Zipcar's case, docker images, ready to be deployed into a diego-based infrastructure) and the tactics that can be employed in coordinating and expressing dependencies between applications that are managed according to their own autonomous schedules. It will discuss the limitations and constraints of pipelined integration testing and will suggest several approaches to overcoming them.

About Derek Van Assche
Derek is a software engineer working for HS2 Solutions in Detroit, Michigan. His primary expertise is in web development using a Java stack, but he also has experience in a variety of other tools and languages. He has particular interests in data analysis and simplifying complicated problems.

Most recently Derek has been working with Zipcar on managing Concourse infrastructure and streamlining the generation and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines. 

About Jason Immerman
As manager of quality engineering, Jason focuses on furthering Zipcar’s continuous delivery implementation within a microservice architecture. Jason holds a BA in physics from Bowdoin College, and conducted research in numerical relativity.

He then made the (quantum) leap to computing, working both as an independent contractor in web development, and in management roles for QA and QA automation at Eze Software Group. Jason is passionate about automating manual processes including testing, artifact management, and deployment.

During downtime, Jason enjoys hiking, woodworking, cooking, and “having deep conversations with his Google Home.”