Thats interesting, GitLabs recent focus on the Docker workflow was one thing that irked me, since we won't be using Docker for the foreseeable future and I'm missing quite a few features to replace Jenkins completely. Has concourse good options for manual deployment?
Note that with GitLab CI, you can having anything run your build. It's just that we typically use Docker as an example and use it ourselves most intensely.
GitLab Runner (the 'slave' that runs your code), is just a Go binary, so it runs on anything you can run a Go binary on, which is pretty close to all major platforms.
My problem with Gitlab CI is that it's not as smart as Jenkins for Java projects. Jenkins beautifully handles maven multi-module projects and knows how to install the dependencies. All other CI-systems are available in Gitlab CE, but Jenkins integration is only available on Gitlab EE. That's the only reason my team doesn't use Gitlab as code repo.
You don't have to "use docker" to use Concourse. It runs docker images under the hood. It only becomes relevant when you define which container image to use to run things.
After a little while you'll realise you want something a bit different, at which point the docker-image resource that's supported by the Concourse team makes it embarrassingly easy. You just tell Concourse "yo, push to this image" and it does the rest.
