Move CI to CFF account

[beyhan]

To agent CIs should be hosted on CFF accounts, so that all approvers have access to it. Currently, it is host on Broadcom infrastructure and only Broadcom approvers can create new releases.

The agent supports also Windows and there are Windows integration tests executed during the validation. The move will require to explore options to execute the Windows integration tests on GCP where all the BOSH validations are hosted.

There is a Slack discussion here which has some more details.

[selzoc]

If we are ok with the cost, the simplest thing to do would be to deploy a single windows 2019 worker in the FIWG concourse and move the pipeline over as-is. Anything else would require refactoring of the pipeline most likely.

[beyhan]

@selzoc which GCP instance type we will need for this? We could also have an approach like for the sole tenancy resource support I refactored in cloudfoundry/bosh-google-cpi-release#367. The sole tenancy instance is very expensive and it is started only for the integration tests execution and destroyed afterwards.

[selzoc]

Our internal windows workers are configured like

cpu: 8
ram: 32768
disk: 524288

which is roughly equivalent to e2-standard-8 I think?

[beyhan]

Yes, I think that should be the recommended instance type.

Here's a quick comparison for the total estimated monthly cost of an n2-standard-8 + Windows + 512 GiB Disk in us-central1:

Plan	Estimated Monthly Cost	Best For
On-Demand	~$541 USD	Short-term projects, testing, unpredictable usage.
1-Year Commitment	~$453 USD	Stable workloads planned for at least a year.
3-Year Commitment	~$388 USD	Long-term, critical applications with a predictable need.

[selzoc]

Also something I just realized is that the integration tests rely on a persistent bosh director that we have deployed, so we'd need either one of those in the CFF account or add a "deploy director" step into the pipeline.

[beyhan]

Actually, the Application Platform WG has also Windows validation tests. We could check with them how they use Windows Workers. Additionally, there is the initiative to have a central Concourse Instance provided by the Concourse WG and with this they could provide a Windows worker used by all CF components to execute Windows validations there. That is why when moving the pipelines we should also consider to move them directly to the central Concourse if it is available.

[aramprice]

Some YAML snippets which might be helpful for getting windows workers setup with the FIWG concourse

• Concourse pipeline.yml snippet:

A bunch of details are left out of of this snippet because they area iaas specific

jobs:
# ... snip ...
-   
  - name: deploy-workers

# ... snip ...

      - put: external-windows-2019-worker-deployment
        inputs: detect
        params:
          cleanup: true
          manifest: "concourse-bosh-deployment/cluster/external-windows-worker.yml"
          ops_files:
            - "concourse-use-latest-release.yml"
            - "windows-worker-config.yml"
          releases:
            - concourse-bosh-release/release.tgz
            - windows-tools-release/release.tgz
            - windows-utilities-release/release.tgz

# ... snip ...
resources:
  - name: windows-tools-release
    type: bosh-io-release
    source:
      repository: cloudfoundry-incubator/windows-tools-release
  - name: windows-utilities-release
    type: bosh-io-release
    source:
      repository: cloudfoundry-incubator/windows-utilities-release

• Ops File: windows-worker-config.yml

- type: replace
  path: /releases/-
  value:
    name: windows-tools
    version: latest

- type: replace
  path: /releases/-
  value:
    name: windows-tools-release
    version: latest

- type: replace
  path: /releases/name=windows-utilities
  value:
    name: windows-utilities
    version: latest

- type: replace
  path: /instance_groups/name=windows-worker/jobs/-
  value:
    name: golang-1-windows
    release: windows-tools

- type: replace
  path: /instance_groups/name=windows-worker/jobs/-
  value:
    name: cmake
    release: windows-tools

- type: replace
  path: /instance_groups/name=windows-worker/jobs/-
  value:
    name: make
    release: windows-tools

- type: replace
  path: /instance_groups/name=windows-worker/jobs/-
  value:
    name: git
    release: windows-tools

- type: replace
  path: /instance_groups/name=windows-worker/jobs/-
  value:
    name: ovftool
    release: windows-tools-release

# Needed for Bosh-PSModules "Describing Protect-CFCell - disables the RDP service and firewall rule"
- type: replace
  path: /instance_groups/name=windows-worker/jobs/-
  value:
    name: enable_rdp
    release: windows-utilities

• Ops File: concourse-use-latest-release.yml

- type: replace
  path: /releases/name=concourse
  value:
    name: concourse
    version: latest