Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Concourse VS AWS CodeBuild

Compare Concourse VS AWS CodeBuild and see what are their differences

Concourse logo Concourse

Pipeline-based CI system written in Go

AWS CodeBuild logo AWS CodeBuild

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  • Concourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-31
  • AWS CodeBuild Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-19

Concourse features and specs

  • Simplicity and Consistency
    Concourse CI offers a simple and consistent UI/UX across different platforms. The interface is intuitive and designed to make it easy for users to visualize complex pipelines.
  • Containerized Builds
    Everything Concourse runs is within containers, ensuring isolated and reproducible builds. This method reduces the chances of environment-related issues during the deployment process.
  • Pipeline as Code
    Concourse utilizes a declarative approach to define pipelines using YAML files, which makes versioning and changing pipelines straightforward and trackable.
  • Scalability
    Concourse is highly scalable and can work well with very large pipelines and numerous concurrent builds, especially fitting for microservices architectures.
  • Dynamic Workflows
    It supports dynamic workflows through its resource/event-driven nature, allowing pipelines to react automatically to changes in resources.

Possible disadvantages of Concourse

  • Steeper Learning Curve
    New users might find Concourse's approach to pipeline as code and its unique abstractions more challenging to grasp initially compared to other CI/CD tools.
  • Limited Plugin Ecosystem
    Compared to other CI/CD platforms, Concourse has a more limited plugin ecosystem, which may require building custom resources for specific tasks that are readily available in other solutions.
  • Resource Intensity
    Due to its containerization strategy, Concourse can be resource-intensive, particularly if not appropriately managed or scaled.
  • Less Community Support
    Although active, the community around Concourse CI is smaller than those for more established CI/CD tools like Jenkins, which can result in fewer community-contributed plugins and resources.
  • Complex Configuration
    While powerful, the configuration files can become complex and hard to manage for large-scale deployments, requiring significant maintenance effort.

AWS CodeBuild features and specs

  • Fully Managed
    AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed continuous integration service. Users do not need to worry about provisioning, managing, and scaling their own build servers.
  • Scalability
    CodeBuild automatically scales up and down to meet the demands of your build process, ensuring that builds are completed quickly without manual intervention.
  • Pay-as-You-Go Pricing
    Users only pay for the compute time they consume with CodeBuild, making it a cost-effective solution for many developer teams.
  • Integration with AWS Services
    CodeBuild integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like S3, EC2, and CloudWatch, providing a cohesive environment for your development and deployment pipelines.
  • Custom Environment Support
    Users can define their own build environments with custom Docker images, providing flexibility to meet specific build requirements.

Possible disadvantages of AWS CodeBuild

  • Complex Setup for Beginners
    Setting up projects in CodeBuild can be complex for users who are new to AWS or continuous integration services.
  • Limited Local Testing
    Unlike some CI tools, AWS CodeBuild provides limited options for running builds locally before pushing changes, which can hinder testing processes.
  • Learning Curve
    Users unfamiliar with AWS services may face a steep learning curve when first using CodeBuild as it involves understanding several AWS concepts and configurations.
  • Potential Costs at Scale
    While the pay-as-you-go model is cost-effective for small workloads, costs can accumulate significantly as usage scales up if not managed carefully.
  • Configuration Management
    Managing build spec files and environment configurations can become complex, especially in projects with many different build processes.

Concourse videos

Concourse Smart Wheels - Review

More videos:

  • Review - Australian Golf Digest TV - Concourse CBM3 Golf Buggy
  • Review - THE GOLF SHOW CONCOURSE CBM3

AWS CodeBuild videos

AWS CodeBuild Tutorial

More videos:

  • Review - AWS CodeBuild Overview
  • Review - All the AWS CodeBuild You Can Stomach in 45 Minutes

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Concourse and AWS CodeBuild)
Continuous Integration
56 56%
44% 44
DevOps Tools
52 52%
48% 48
Continuous Deployment
55 55%
45% 45
Code Collaboration
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Concourse should be more popular than AWS CodeBuild. It has been mentiond 23 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Concourse mentions (23)

  • GitHub Actions Has a Package Manager, and It Might Be the Worst
    Open source: - https://concourse-ci.org/ (discussed in the context of Radicle here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44658820 ) - Jenkins -etc. - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
  • Tracking Supermarket Prices with Playwright
    > My CI of choice is [Concourse](https://concourse-ci.org/) which describes itself as "a continuous thing-doer". While it has a bit of a learning curve, I appreciate its declarative model for the pipelines and how it versions every single input to ensure reproducible builds as much as it can. What's the thought process behind using a CI server - which I thought is mainly for builds - for what essentially is a data... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed
    > Imagine you live in a world where no part of the build has to repeat unless the changes actually impacted it. A world in which all builds happened with automatic parallelism. A world in which you could reproduce very reliably any part of the build on your laptop. That sounds similar to https://concourse-ci.org/ I quite like it, but it never seemed to gain traction outside of Cloud Foundry. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
  • Ask HN: What do you use to run background jobs?
    I used Concourse[0] for a while. No real complaints, the visibility is nice but the functionality isn't anything new. [0] https://concourse-ci.org/. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago
  • How to host React/Next "Cheaply" with a global audience? (NGO needs help)
    We run https://concourse-ci.org/ on our own hardware at our office. (as a side note, running your own hardware, you realise just how abysmally slow most cloud servers are.). Source: over 3 years ago
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AWS CodeBuild mentions (14)

  • 8 Key BYOC Deployment Options Every Data Engineer Should Know
    A well-documented example is Flightcontrol, which deploys application workloads to customers' own AWS accounts using Amazon ECS with either Fargate or EC2 launch types rather than Kubernetes. Fargate is the default path (serverless compute, no node management), while ECS with EC2 is available for teams that need GPU support, Reserved Instance pricing, or custom instance types. All builds run in the customer's AWS... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Low Cost "Overkill" AWS Infrastructure for a Newborn Startup
    Therefore, I used AWS Codebuild and AWS CodePipeline to automate the steps of building and deploying the services. The diagram below depicts all the steps required to continuously deliver the frontend and backend applications:. - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • How CodeCatalyst compares to other AWS Services related to Development and CI/CD processes
    We treat these services in one  group as they belong together from a strategic point of view. They have been around for a few years and the teams that built these are now involved in CodeCatalyst. CodeCatalyst partly uses them โ€œunder the hoodโ€. CodeCommit is a managed git hosting, CodeBuild is a managed โ€œbuildโ€ system, CodeStar is a โ€œproject managementโ€ tool. CodePipeline allows combining multiple CodeBuild steps... - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago
  • Well-Architected Review - Part II - Operational Excellence
    Design for Operations You should implement your entire workload as code. The benefit is that you can apply the same engineering discipline that you use for application code to your infrastructure. Use version control system like AWS Codecommit to enable tracking of changes and releases, and use AWS Cloudformation for your infrastructure templates. It is recommendable to test and validate changes to help limit... - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
  • DevSecOps with AWS - Multi Environment deployments - Part 2
    AWS CodeBuild: fully managed continuous integration service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Concourse and AWS CodeBuild, you can also consider the following products

Jenkins - Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server with 300+ plugins to support all kinds of software development

AWS CodePipeline - Continuous delivery service for fast and reliable application updates

Travis CI - Simple, flexible, trustworthy CI/CD tools. Join hundreds of thousands who define tests and deployments in minutes, then scale up simply with parallel or multi-environment builds using Travis CIโ€™s precision syntaxโ€”all with the developer in mind.

CircleCI - CircleCI gives web developers powerful Continuous Integration and Deployment with easy setup and maintenance.

Drone.io - Continuous Integration For GitHub and Bitbucket That Monitors Your code For Bugs

Bitrise - Tens of thousands of agencies, startups and enterprise companies with mobile apps - including Runkeeper, Grindr, Duolingo and more - use Bitrise to automate their way to increased productivity & speed