Introducing CentralCI: Production-Ready Concourse with Zero Management Overhead

Concourse CI has long been appreciated by teams who need more than just basic Continuous Integration. While other CI tools have come and gone, Concourse maintains a dedicated following because it solves problems that other systems simply can’t address effectively. Now, with CentralCI’s managed Concourse service, teams can leverage all of Concourse’s unique strengths without the operational overhead.

What Makes Concourse Different

Unlike traditional CI/CD tools that focus primarily on individual repository workflows, Concourse was designed from the ground up to orchestrate complex, multi-stage pipelines that span multiple repositories and environments. This fundamental difference gives Concourse several key advantages:

1. Pipeline-First Philosophy

Concourse provides a holistic view of your entire deployment process. Instead of isolated workflows triggered by git events, Concourse shows you a comprehensive pipeline from development to production. This unified view helps teams understand dependencies, visualize the complete path to production, and is ”anger optimised” to instantly spot failures. Pipeline demo is available here.

2. Programmable Triggers

Concourse offers unique “programmable triggers” through its simple check/in/out interface for custom resource types, enabling powerful automations that other CI/CD systems simply can’t match. This design allows teams to build sophisticated workflows like automatically creating new pipelines and infrastructure whenever a developer creates a new GitHub repo. With this capability, organizations have built complete Platform Engineering cultures without custom services, extending Concourse beyond basic CI/CD into a comprehensive automation platform.

3. Superior Developer Experience

Concourse offers powerful developer tools like fly execute (for running tasks with local inputs in isolated environments) and fly intercept (for real-time container debugging). Tasks are designed to be ephemeral and idempotent, ensuring consistent results regardless of where they run. This approach offers particularly effective testing and debugging capabilities compared to most other CI systems.

4. Cross-Environment Orchestration

For teams following GitOps patterns or managing complex deployment workflows, Concourse provides the missing link that many tools lack: a way to tie the dev, staging, and prod environments together into a coherent pipeline. This capability is precisely where Concourse excels.

CentralCI: Managed Concourse Without the Headaches

While Concourse offers these powerful capabilities, maintaining a Concourse installation has historically required significant effort. CentralCI, a US-based company, solves this problem by providing fully-managed Concourse with additional enterprise features:

• Zero-maintenance infrastructure - focus on your pipelines, not on maintaining CI servers
• Enterprise-grade security with SOC compliance, advanced auditing, and AWS PrivateLink capabilities
• Performance-optimized machine images with architecture-tuned Concourse binaries delivering superior execution speed
• Flexible scaling that adapts to workload demands without excess capacity
• 24/7 expert support from specialists who understand Concourse and complex CI/CD workflows
• Guaranteed uptime SLAs (up to 99.95%) for mission-critical deployments

Why This Combination Matters

Teams that adopt CentralCI’s managed Concourse service get the best of both worlds: Concourse’s superior pipeline orchestration capabilities without the operational burden. This combination is particularly valuable for:

• Platform engineering teams building self-service internal developer platforms
• Organizations with complex deployment processes across multiple environments
• Teams needing to automate workflows beyond simple git-triggered builds
• Companies following GitOps practices that need visibility across their entire deployment pipeline

Our Journey So Far

Since the start of this year, we’ve significantly increased development efforts on Concourse after a two-year period of minimal maintenance. Version 7.13 delivers substantial improvements for both users and operators. Together with the community, we’ve focused on fixing long-standing bugs while modernizing the codebase to ensure sustainability.

For everyday users, we’ve addressed some frustrating pain points:

• Fixed the Chrome browser login issue where you’d see “your token could not be sent to fly” (but it actually was)
• Added a background_filter property so you can customize pipeline backgrounds with more colorful options
• Updated typeface with ligature support and improved alignment

For pipeline authors, we’ve made several quality-of-life improvements:

• Formally integrated the set_pipeline functionality (removing those ‘experimental’ warnings)
• Updated AWS SDKs for registry-image, s3, and semver resources to v2, allowing resources to use the Concourse Worker’s IAM role without requiring static credentials
• Upgraded to the latest MDI icons with 2,350 new icons available for your pipelines

For operators and contributors, we’ve modernized the codebase:

• Upgraded to Go 1.24 for better performance and security
• Switched to the PGX database driver as lib/pq enters maintenance-only status
• Resolved the UUID collision bug that caused mysterious “container already exists” errors by migrating to google/uuid which implements RFC 9562 correctly
• Upgraded to D3 v7, Graphviz v12.2.1
• Optimized performance with better HTTP compression, lock-free synchronization, and SVG size reduction

The community also contributed some important changes:

• Resolved the frustrating bug that forced you to log in again after using fly login with an existing browser session
• Introduced ‘privileged-mode’ giving administrators more control over task privilege levels

In other exciting news, Concourse officially joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation in February 2025. This transition, which had been in progress through multiple corporate acquisitions (Pivotal → VMware → Broadcom), marks an important milestone for the project’s governance and future development.

Version 8.0, targeted for late summer release, emphasizes features and performance improvements, as shown in the already open PR’s. Current development efforts include:

• ARMv8 architecture support
• Build sidecars (e.g., running Postgres while executing integration tests)
• FIPS 140-2 compliance
• OpenAPI 3.1 specification with stable API versioning
• Terraform provider offering infrastructure-as-code consistency, robust validation, and powerful programmatic features beyond traditional YAML configuration
• Anthropic MCP Server for use with Claude (now available in private beta)

Getting Started

CentralCI provides all the power of Concourse without the operational complexities. Our service starts at $799/month with flexible tiers designed to grow with your needs—from startups committed to CI/CD best practices to enterprises running mission-critical deployment pipelines.

Concourse has always stood apart from conventional CI tools through its comprehensive pipeline visualization, powerful cross-repository orchestration, and developer-friendly debugging tools. CentralCI enhances these strengths by eliminating the maintenance burden, adding enterprise security features, and providing expert support when you need it.

The result? Your team gets to focus exclusively on building better software delivery pipelines while we handle the infrastructure, scaling, and ongoing maintenance. With guaranteed uptime SLAs up to 99.95% and 24/7 support from Concourse specialists, you can deploy with confidence knowing your CI/CD backbone is solid, secure, and expertly managed.

Any further questions? Come chat with us in our Discord community!

And One More Thing…

And one more thing – we’re proud to announce that Taylor Silva, the lead maintainer of Concourse, has joined CentralCI as a co-founder. Taylor has been instrumental to Concourse development dating back to his time at Pivotal in 2019 and has recently stepped into the leadership role for the entire project.

With over five years of deep experience with the codebase and a commitment to advancing Concourse full-time, Taylor brings unparalleled expertise to CentralCI. Under his leadership, we’re not just offering a managed service – we’re investing in the future of Concourse itself and actively contributing to its continued development under the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

This direct connection to Concourse’s core leadership ensures that CentralCI customers will always have access to the most cutting-edge features and expert support while helping sustain the open-source project that powers modern CI/CD pipelines around the world.