PCF Platform Automation with Concourse (PCF Pipelines)

Previously I blogged about using "Bubble" or bosh-bootloader as per the post below.

http://theblasfrompas.blogspot.com/2018/08/bosh-bootloader-or-bubble-as-pronounced.html

... and from there setting up Concourse

http://theblasfrompas.blogspot.com/2018/08/deploying-concourse-using-my-bubble.html

.. of course this was created so I can now use the PCF Pipelines to deploy Pivotal Cloud Foundry's Pivotal Application Service (PAS). At a high level this is how to achieve this with some screen shots on the end result

Steps

1. To get started you would use this link as follows. In my example I was deploying PCF to AWS

https://github.com/pivotal-cf/pcf-pipelines/tree/master/install-pcf

AWS Install Pipeline

https://github.com/pivotal-cf/pcf-pipelines/tree/master/install-pcf/aws

2. Create a versioned bucket for holding terraform state. on AWS that will look as follows

3. Unless you ensure AWS pre-reqs are meet you won't be able to install PCF so this link highlights all that you will need for installing PCF on AWS such as key pairs, limits, etc

https://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/2-1/customizing/aws.html

4. Create a public DNS zone, get its zone ID we will need that when we setup the pipeline shortly. I also created a self signed public certificate used for my DNS as part of the setup which is required as well.

5. At this point we can download the PCF Pipelines from network.pivotal.io or you can use the link as follows

https://network.pivotal.io/products/pcf-automation/

6. Once you have unzipped the file you would then change to the directory for the write IaaS in my case "aws"

$ cd pcf-pipelines/install-pcf/aws


7. Change all of the CHANGEME values in params.yml with real values for your AWS env. This file is documented so you are clear with what you need to add and where. Most of the values are defaults of course.

8. Login to concourse using the "fly" command line

$ fly --target pcfconcourse login  --concourse-url https://bosh-director-aws-concourse-lb-f827ef220d02270c.elb.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com -k

9. Add pipeline

$ fly -t pcfconcourse set-pipeline -p deploy-pcf -c pipeline.yml -l params.yml

10. Unpause pipeline

$ fly -t pcfconcourse unpause-pipeline -p deploy-pcf

pasapicella@pas-macbook:~/pivotal/aws/pcf-pipelines/pcf-pipelines/install-pcf/aws$ fly -t pcfconcourse pipelines
name        paused  public
deploy-pcf  no      no

11. The pipeline on concourse will look as follows

12. Now to execute the pipeline you have to manually run 2 tasks

- Run bootstrap-terraform-state job manually

- Run create-infrastructure manually

 

At this point the pipeline will kick of automatically. If you need to run-run due to an issue you can manually kick off the task after you fix what you need to fix. The “wipe-env” task will take everything for PAS down and terraform removes all IaaS config as well.

While running each task current state is shown as per the image below

If successful your AWS account will the PCF VM's created for example

Verify that PCF installed is best done using Pivotal Operations Manager as shown below

More Information

https://network.pivotal.io/products/pcf-automation/