1. Automated PCF Upgrades with
Concourse
By Richard Ruedin II
@RichRuedinII
1

2. Unless otherwise indicated, these slides are © 2013 -2016 Piv otal Software, Inc. and licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Agenda
2
• The Challenge
• How To Start
• How To Validate
• Measuring Success
• Q&A

3. Unless otherwise indicated, these slides are © 2013 -2016 Piv otal Software, Inc. and licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
The Challenge
3
“Within 30 days of a minor release of a Pivotal Product, all environments
will be required to be updated to that version.”
“All environments must be upgraded with little to no human intervention.”

4. Unless otherwise indicated, these slides are © 2013 -2016 Piv otal Software, Inc. and licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Why Is This Difficult?
4
Here are some stats on recent Pivotal product releases in the past 30 days:
• Operations Manager – 2 updates to 1.11.x
• Elastic Runtime – 5 updates to 1.11.x
• RabbitMQ – 2 updates to 1.10.x
If you have a total of five environments and just these three example products,
you have 45 updates to install.

5. Unless otherwise indicated, these slides are © 2013 -2016 Piv otal Software, Inc. and licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
How To Start?
5
Concourse CI (https://concourse.ci/) instance with access to your environments
• PCF API Endpoint
• Operations Manager URL
Clone the PCF Pipelines GitHub repo - https://github.com/pivotal-cf/pcf-pipelines
Fly CLI installed to push pipelines to Concourse

6. Unless otherwise indicated, these slides are © 2013 -2016 Piv otal Software, Inc. and licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
About PCF Pipelines
6
Starting point to automate the installing and the upgrading of Pivotal Cloud
Foundry components
• Deploy a fresh installation of PCF based on Pivotal reference architecture
• Upgrade Buildpacks
• Upgrade Operations Manager
• Upgrade Product Tiles
Compatible with all Pivotal supported IaaS so public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) or
on-premise setups (vSphere and Openstack)

7. Unless otherwise indicated, these slides are © 2013 -2016 Piv otal Software, Inc. and licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Customize For You
7
Some ideas to configure your pipelines for your environment:
• Integrate with your ticket / change management system
• Notifications
• Toggling Alerts On and Off
• Multi-foundation support
Concourse has many resource types to help you with these customizations. You
can see a list here, https://concourse.ci/resource-types.html. Use the Generic
HTTP API resource if there is not already a resource created to integrate with a
system outside of Concourse.

8. Unless otherwise indicated, these slides are © 2013 -2016 Piv otal Software, Inc. and licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
How To Validate?
8

9. Unless otherwise indicated, these slides are © 2013 -2016 Piv otal Software, Inc. and licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
What Do You Test?
Create Build Environment
• Create PCF Org and Space
• Create Services from Marketplace
• Assign Application Security Group
Deploy Applications
• Pick commonly used buildpacks
• Bind to the Marketplace Services
Smoke Test Examples
• MySQL (create table, read/write
data, etc)
• Read log messages by creating a
firehose nozzle
• Deploy/Read configuration from
Spring Cloud Config Server
• Cache random values in Redis and
read those results
• Custom SSL Certificate Validation
9

10. Unless otherwise indicated, these slides are © 2013 -2016 Piv otal Software, Inc. and licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
Measuring Success
10
Increased velocity of delivering functionality to our customers and mitigating found
security vulnerabilities
Before Automated Upgrades:
• One patch for one product would take at least 45 business days to go through 9
environments
• To get to a new minor version, it would take at least 3 to 4 months.
After Automated Upgrades:
• One patch for one product will take around 5 business days to go through 9
environments
• We are meeting our goal of 30 days for any new minor version.

11. Unless otherwise indicated, these slides are © 2013 -2016 Piv otal Software, Inc. and licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
References
11
PCF Pipelines – https://github.com/pivotal-cf/pcf-pipelines
Concourse – https://concourse.ci/
List of Concourse Resource Types – https://concourse.ci/resource-types.html
My Blog – http://www.cloudengineeringblog.com/

12. Unless otherwise indicated, these slides are © 2013 -2016 Piv otal Software, Inc. and licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
12
Q & A

13. Learn More. Stay Connected.
13
#springone@s1p