concourse

Concourse is a term with multiple relevant meanings, typically referring to physical spaces in public buildings and to a software project in the tech industry. In architecture and transit design, a concourse is a large open area inside a building such as a train station or airport, intended for circulation, waiting, and social gathering. Concourse spaces connect platforms, gates, ticketing areas, and retail zones, and may be covered by a roof or glass atrium. They are designed to handle large crowds, aid wayfinding, and provide accessible navigation. The word derives from Old French concourse, from Latin concursus, meaning a running together or meeting.

In computing, Concourse denotes an open-source continuous integration and deployment system. It is built around pipelines that describe a sequence of tasks and the resources they require. Core concepts include pipelines, jobs, tasks, and resources; each step runs in a container, promoting isolated and reproducible builds. Concourse emphasizes declarative configuration, versioned pipelines, and a web-based user interface, along with a REST API and a distributed runner architecture with workers. It is used to automate building, testing, and deploying software across diverse environments, especially within cloud-native and containerized workflows.

The term can also appear in more general references to a public gathering space or in proper nouns such as names of buildings or facilities. While most commonly associated with transit hubs, concourse remains a flexible descriptor for open, connector spaces in architecture as well as a label for software tooling in modern development practices.