ODSo its been a one week of using Octopus Deploy for me and its fair to say I am impressed.

API
Octopus deploy was written API-first with the UI built on top, this mean that anything you need to do or access can be done either from the command line or from the available Nuget package, documentation for the API is also great and is up on github here.

Documentation
The documentation is very thorough, don’t think I have managed to come across anything which hasn’t either been covered or discussed via the support forums which have plenty of detail.

Blue/Green Deployment
One necessity at work for us is repeatable automated deployments, we currently have this already as I’ve mentioned before with MSBuild scripts and use of TeamCity for the builds. The idea of Blue/Green deployments is something we need for our external facing website at work and is a major plus point with Octopus Deploy, we can build our release version of the website and publish this internally for testing purposes and then switch this to production in an instant, this way we know our production environment includes the latest fixes/changes and has been tested by our QA department.

The documentation for OD covers Blue-green deployments and this along with Scheduled Deployments make the case for using Octopus Deploy a strong one.

Why you should look at Octopus Deploy
I have spent a week trying out different kinds of project deployment, as per previous post as well as testing out deploying an internal .Net website, its been pretty much very straight-forward, it handles web.config transforms, app.config transforms and even substituting variables held within OD for settings in both app.configs and web.configs (connection strings, NLog settings etc.).

Scheduled deployments, Blue/Green deployments are a big selling point to us, on top of that a well written API with good documentation (which uses confluence which is also nice) makes it an easy sell – I am fairly sure we will be changing our deployment strategy to use this going forward and I am happy about that.

One last very nice thing is the sharing of PowerShell scripts which means you can make use of existing scripts, write new ones and share them with the community up on github and help make OD even better – version 3.0 also looks like it will bring even more good stuff to the mix when that is released in the coming months.

I hope to look at deploying database’s using Octopus Deploy at some point fairly soon.

So take a look at Octopus Deploy and I’m sure you wont be disappointed! – that’s all for now.