From the frontline: Octopus Server performance tuning

We’ve been running Octopus Deploy since 2.0 back in January 2014 as part of our head-to-head battle royale with Release Management 2013. We decided on Octopus in February and our pilot testing started in late March early April with a handful of teams and users. Our shiny server (*ahem* virtual machine) with Octopus Deploy was chugging along and we all had an oh so wonderful user...

Versioning in Octopus Deploy (Part I)

Versioning – NuGet and Octopus Deploy will force this issue of versioning on your projects and it’s in your best interest to give it some thought. Within Octopus, your releases are versioned as well as your NuGet packages however packages are versioned externally of Octopus, so some prudence will pay dividends down the road. I’ve found that one of the biggest hurdles with versioning is where...

SDC Presentation – Intro to Octopus Deploy

On Sunday, January 11th 2015 at 1:00pm, I’ll be presenting Octopus Deploy at the Software Development Community (SDC) in Naperville, Illinois. I’ve attended a few of the SDC meetings and it’s a solid crowd. There have been interesting topics presented before so I hope I can make Octopus as interesting to others as it is to me. Since this is an introductory presentation,...

Chicago ALM Users Group – Agile Metrics

Yesterday night I attended the Chicago ALM Users Group session on Agile Metrics, given by Doc Norton. It was a very interesting topic and a great presentation altogether. Rather than reiterate the subject itself, you can view a video that Doc has available on his blog. A big thank you to Angela Dugan (blog) for organizing the event and to Polaris Solutions for sponsoring. Another...

Backing up projects on Octopus Tentacles? Think twice

I’ve noticed many of our Octopus teams use the File System – Backup Directory step template from the library to implement a backup step. Unfortunately, I’ve seen minimal prudence from said teams implementing backups. Many of these teams simply backup their project across most if not all of their environments while having no rollback steps whatsoever. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Octopus Step...