Octopus Deploy

In the last activity, we concluded our exploration of Advanced Continuous Deployment. Now we’re going to look at Continuous Delivery with Octopus and, in this learning step, we will discover what Octopus Deploy is and how you can use it for Continuous Delivery.

Octopus Deploy is an automated deployment and release management solution. It can be used as part of your delivery pipeline to deploy your application to all your servers in a parallel and secure fashion, easing the task of automating deploys.

The pipeline can support multiple environments (e.g. developing, staging, and production) and each environment can have multiple machines or services (example deploy to multiple front ends running IIS and a database server) as a single unit.

To use Octopus Deploy, you need to install Octopus Deploy server and lightweight agent service on the machine(s) to where you want to deploy code (e.g., web server). Octopus supports deploying to both on-premises or to cloud offerings.

There is no need to install the agent(s) to deploy to cloud services (for example, PaaS offerings like Azure Web Apps or server-less compute services like Aazing Web Service Lambda.

User Identity

Octopus can integrate with your organisation identity system. There is no need for you to manage identities in Octopus. Your access policies are enforced (for example password change policies or two-factor authentication) and it can use several methods of authenticating your users. It can use more than one of the following simultaneously:

• Username/password. The simplest method, allow users to authenticate against the internal database
• Active Directory. Authenticate users using Active Directory with either integration windows authentication or forms-based authentication.
• Azure Active Directory. Authenticate users against your Azure AD
• GoogleApps. Authenticate users against your organisation Google Apps accounts.
• Okta. Use Okta for identity management and authentication

Some providers can also map directory roles against Octopus roles.

In the next step, we will investigate Octopus in a Continuous Delivery World.