Octopus Deploy is purpose-built for deployment orchestration: tenants, runbooks, environments, lifecycle gates, and variable scoping, and is designed to work with whatever CI you already have. It’s infrastructure-agnostic by design, built for enterprise environments where teams run multiple clouds, target types, and toolchains at the same time.
Octopus comes in two flavours: Octopus Cloud, where we host and manage everything for you, or Octopus Server, where you install and run it on your own infrastructure.
Running an outdated Octopus Server is a quiet risk. This post covers why staying current matters, and why Octopus Cloud is worth considering if you’d rather focus on shipping software than maintaining the tool that ships it.
Below, I cover what Octopus updates actually contain, because security patches, bug fixes and more, matter just as much as new features.
Performance improvements
Performance is key not only for our customers but also for us. Every time we bake a new build internally, we test it to ensure it’s not worse than the previous version. We run tests against our software, and our staff get to try it out first before it propagates upwards.
You might be asking yourself, “What does this look like?” Bob Walker, Field CTO at Octopus, covers this in a great talk, available on YouTube. The talk covers how we ship changes, who gets to test them, and when these changes land for our self-hosted customers.
If you don’t already know, Octopus Cloud is one quarter ahead of Octopus Server.
So what does it look like? If the build is happy against automated tests:
- Staff - We dog food our own app, our main deploy instance is the first one that’s updated
- Canary Customers (+3 days) - We deploy to a random subset of Octopus Cloud customers, about 5% of active instances, which is randomized each time
- Stable (+2 days) - We then deliver to the majority of our Cloud customers’ instances
- Laggards - By this point, the release has already been running in production across thousands of instances, and we update the remaining Octopus Cloud instances
- Octopus Server - Eventually, self-hosted Octopus customers will be able to download the latest version of our software
Should you want to learn more about performance for your self-hosted instance of Octopus Server, be sure to check out the documentation on performance. We handle performance for you when you’re on Octopus Cloud.
Improved compatibility & integrations
We’re always ensuring Octopus remains compatible with the most popular software tools and integrations. We have documentation on compatibility that goes into detail, as well as our integrations page on our website.
By staying up to date, you ensure you are ready for whatever the world throws at you and can adopt and implement new integrations as they become available.
Bug fixes
No one likes bugs; these can be nuanced and overlooked. You can view our release notes on our website, and you can also track which version you are on and which target version you plan to upgrade to using the compare versions option.
We present information clearly about breaking changes, bugs, and more.
Quality of life tweaks
We believe in listening to our customers’ feedback; it’s quite important to us and one of our core values for every Octonaut at Octopus.
Our customers help us sharpen our product even further, and we often revisit features, integrations, and more to refine them and make their lives easier.
You can learn more about Octopus’s core values in our handbook.
Security patches for CVEs
Everyone knows that a core part of keeping your software up to date is addressing security issues, and we publish this information in various places:
- Release notes
- Security Advisories page
We also have a Security Disclosure Policy.
Compliance
Building on security patching, you have to ask yourself: how do you remain compliant if you don’t update your software regularly?
It’s important that you understand and upgrade your software regularly; this isn’t just an Octopus need, it’s for all software. By staying up to date, you ensure your business remains compliant and that audit checks pass with flying colors.
Enhancements to existing features
Just because we’ve shipped a feature doesn’t mean it’s done and forgotten; we’re always listening and looking for ways to improve what we offer.
You’ll always gain by updating Octopus software, and more often than not, you’ll learn about these in our blog section on our website. You can also subscribe, so you’re always up to date with any new blogs that are published.
A great example of this is Platform Hub, where we are releasing this functionality to our customers. You might be asking what Platform Hub is? Check that out in this blog post. We also have a feature page, should you be interested.
New features
We love building features that make developers’ lives easier.
You can see what we’re up to by visiting our public roadmap, leave us a signal on what’s important to you by voting, and you can also submit ideas directly to our product and engineering teams for consideration.
Staying within vendor support
Every Octopus software release receives six months of critical patches.
You can learn more about this on our blog post, where we discuss it, and in our documentation, which covers it for self-hosted Octopus customers.
Should you ever need to contact the Octopus Deploy Support Team, the team will be happy to help.
Deprecations
Occasionally, Octopus will deprecate features that will no longer be supported. These features are eventually removed.
Staying up to date means you’re protected against known vulnerabilities as soon as fixes are available, and you’re not carrying risks that have already been solved.
You can learn more about this in our docs.
Conclusion
The longer you leave it (not updating regularly), the more risk you carry, the more it costs to resolve when something breaks, and the longer it takes to get back on track. Staying current keeps your attack surface small.
If you prefer that Octopus handle upgrading Octopus for you, then I’d recommend Octopus Cloud. Octopus Cloud reliably hosts thousands of Octopus Deploy customers.
Octopus Cloud is the easiest way to run Octopus Deploy. It has the same software and functionality as Octopus Server, except we host it for you and we call it a Cloud instance. You don’t need to download, install, or manage it yourself. You can get started with a free account to try it out.
You can learn more about its architecture in this blog post.
Happy deployments!
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