What is Octopus Deploy?

Focus

Octopus is designed as a dedicated, Continuous Delivery platform with a focus on releasing and deploying software, in the spirit of “do one thing, really well”. It does not aim to solve the entire software delivery pipeline but rather aims to focus on going deeper on release and deployment than other solutions.

Octopus has a modern, friendly user experience that makes it easy for your teams to self-service application releases and democratizes how you deliver software. Octopus also has a comprehensive API - anything the UI can do, the API can do too. Octopus takes over where your CI server ends, modeling the entire release orchestration process of software. 

This includes: - Release versioning - Environment promotion (beyond simple dev/test/prod workflows) - Deployment automation - Progressive software delivery (rolling deployments, blue/green, canary) - Configuration management - Approvals & ITSM integration - Deployment freezes - Coordinating deployments across projects and their dependencies You can use Octopus to deploy anything, anywhere. Whether it’s Kubernetes, Linux or Windows virtual machines, Amazon Web Services, Azure, or Google Cloud, so long as Octopus can speak to it via our Tentacle agent, SSH, command line, or a web service, Octopus can deploy to it.

Advanced role-based access control ensures only the right people can deploy to production, all changes are audited, and teams can get their work done without the proliferation of admin access to cloud accounts or privileged systems. Octopus can be self-managed and hosted in your own infrastructure or private cloud, or we can host it for you in Octopus Cloud. Octopus models deployments in advanced ways that allow you to tame complexity at scale. For example, if “deploying to production” means a coordinated rollout of applications and dependencies across geographically distributed clusters in the cloud on behalf of thousands of end-customers, each with their instances of your application, or pushing releases out to edge networks or servers running in physical retail stores, hospitals or hotels. Using tenanted deployments, Octopus aims to enable you to model this in ways no other CD tool can.

Background

Octopus Deploy is a sophisticated continuous delivery (CD) platform for modern software teams. Octopus offers powerful release orchestration, deployment automation, and runbook automation while handling the scale, complexity, and governance expectations of large organizations with the most complex deployment challenges.

Paul and Sonia Stovell founded Octopus Deploy in 2012. In the years before, Paul had watched programmers at organizations of all sizes routinely remote into production machines to patch configuration files or write long and semi-complete documents because automating deployments was too time-consuming. These practices were hampering organizations' ability to deliver and give their customers confidence. The concept of Octopus came about with a desire to solve those problems. 

Octopus Deploy main features

Configure and define your deployment process once

‍With over 450 steps, you can deploy just about anything without scripting using Octopus. Variables in Octopus let you use the same deployment process across your environments without hardcoding configuration settings into your process. This allows you to deploy and promote with confidence from dev to production.

Octopus supports cloud-native, on-premises, and hybrid platforms

‍Octopus supports your team's entire suite of applications and services running on a variety of infrastructure - from containers and serverless through to physical and virtual machines.

Version control your deployment process without compromise

‍Version controlling your processes shouldn't mean working only with code. Config as Code brings together the power of Git all within the Octopus UI, so you can choose to work where you're most productive.