Intro to Octopus Deploy

I’m kicking off my Octopus Deploy series with my presentation on Octopus Deploy for the Chicago .NET Users Group tonight. It was a great meeting and I think a lot of people got a lot of good information on Octopus Deploy.
Programming in the .NET world has made remarkable strides over the past ten years. From frameworks like Entity Framework, MVC, to language enhancements such as LINQ, lambda expressions, anonymous methods, extension methods and so on, all added value to the .NET ecosystem. However as application programming gains more features and tools, in my opinion the most overlooked aspect of applications is deployment.
The majority of jobs I’ve had never directly addressed the problem of deployment. Some teams had figured out series of steps or a checklist to follow after lessons learned from trial-and-error. I’ve seen deployments successes/failures hinge on emails and spreadsheets for that *one* little piece of information that was overlooked. Ironic how something so critical as deployment is treated as an afterthought. I’ve watched teams just copy/paste files manually and watched the progress bar. There has to be a better way.
I partially blame the waterfall method of development bleeding into the world of deployments. I hate the vague/random estimation of waterfall and deployments seem to get even more vague estimation. I don’t think people appreciate all the moving parts of a deployment. The servers, operating systems, networks, configuration, etc. etc. It can be argued that deployments can be as complex as development especially when multiple technologies are used. And just like with waterfall, eventually something fails and someone has to mop up the mess. The other side of the blame actually falls on developers unfortunately. For all our ingenuity, we fall a little short when it comes to the simple dirty work of deployment. But that’s just it: deployment is seldom simple.
Enter Octopus Deploy. All this time for devops or developers responsible for deployment, you’ve been missing out. I’ve been missing out. Octopus Deploy has only been around for a few years, but it’s made a remarkable impact on the .NET development community and continues to do so at a great pace. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting a series of Octopus Deploy articles that will walk through the basics, get into the nitty-gritty with samples to show how to get started by installing and configuring your Octopus Deploy environment. I may create some short videos as well to demonstrate specific features or possibilities using Octopus Deploy.
photo credit: Joe Parks via photopin cc