Deprecations

Overview

From time to time, Octopus will deprecate features that are no longer going to be supported, and will eventually be removed.

Deprecations have the following lifecycle:

  • Announce deprecation
  • (+6 months) Toggle off deprecated functionality
  • (+1 year) Remove deprecated functionality

Deprecations are subject to change in detail or time frame. If you need help assessing the impact of deprecation of a feature on your particular Octopus Server configuration, please contact our support team.

Planned Deprecations

Dropping capability for Windows Server 2008 Workers and Targets in 2025.1

Microsoft dropped extended support for the Windows Server 2008 family in January 2020. This operating system is also the last Windows OS that does not support .NET Core, the language upon which most of Octopus Deploy is built upon. The complexity that is therefore required to operate on this legacy platform has begun outweigh the value that we can justify it brings to our customers.

It has already been noted for several years that Octopus no longer actively tests against or supports Windows Server 2008. The planned change in 2025.1 will simply make this operating system requirement more definitive by introducing changes that will likely prevent standard deployment and runbook tasks from executing.

To provide ample time to act, from Octopus Server 2024.1, workloads that run on Windows 2008 Servers will begin logging warnings. It’s highly recommended that you upgrade your targets to a later version of Windows Server before 2025.1 to prepare for the removal of functionality.

Further notes about this pending change are mentioned in the 2024.1 deprecation blog post

Deprecations for 2024.1

Helm V2

Helm V2 was deprecated in November 2020 and is no longer receiving any updates.

As a result, coupled with very low usage, Helm V2 support will be disabled in 2024.3 and removed in 2025.1. Deprecation warnings in both the UI and in task logs where Helm V2 is being used have been added in 2024.1.

There is an official Helm V2 to V3 migration guide which details the process of migrating to using Helm V3. Once this has been done, the Helm Upgrade deployment process steps in Octopus Server need to be updated to specify Helm V3, rather than Helm V2.

Azure Cloud Services (Classic)

Azure have announced the sun setting of the original Cloud Services resource, renamed Cloud Services (Classic), with the final retirement date set as August 31, 2024. In a little over 6 months, teams that are still relying on this cloud service will be unable to deploy to them at all, with Octopus Deploy or otherwise.

In the lead up to this, Octopus workloads making use of Azure Cloud Service Targets, Azure Cloud Service Steps or Management Certificates in Octopus Deploy will start to see in-app and in-task warnings appear in Octopus Server 2024.1.

Once support has been fully dropped for these resources by Azure mid-year, then these warnings will turn into errors followed by the removal of these resources from Octopus instances entirely.

The recommended migration path outlined by Azure is to make use of the separate Azure Cloud Services (extended support) product, however at this time there are no plans to support this feature in Octopus natively.

Mono based SSH Deployment Targets

From 2024.1 SSH deployments will no longer support running tasks via Mono. Instead, Linux workers and targets will only execute using .NET Core compiled tooling, which for most cases can be enabled via a simple configuration change on the machine configuration page. Further details on the background for this update as well as the reasoning behind it are available on the Deprecating Mono blog post.

Dropped support for Windows Server 2003 and un-patched Windows Server 2008 Workers and Targets

Windows Server 2003 Workers and Targets will no longer execute Octopus workloads from 2024.1. It is highly recommended that you upgrade your targets to a later version of Windows Server before updating your Octopus Server instance to this release as deployments and runbooks using these machines are unlikely to run.

Windows Server 2008 Workers and Targets that do not have the latest Service Packs installed will also no longer execute Octopus workloads from 2024.1 due to the dependency on .NET Framework 4.6.2 which is unavailable on these Operating Systems. It is highly recommended that you upgrade your targets to a later version of Windows Server before updating your Octopus Server instance to this release as deployments and runbooks using these machines are unlikely to run.

Further details on the background for this update are available on the Dropping support for Windows Server 2003 machines blog post.

F# Script Steps

Due to the low uptake of F# script steps and the work required to upgrade them for continued use in our modern codebase, we will no longer be supporting F# script steps from 2024.1. Customers who continue to need F# scripts in later Octopus versions should use standard shell scripting (powershell or bash) and invoke their scripts via their own F# tools included in additional referenced packages.

Deprecations for 2023.3

Project level /runbooks/all API endpoint

The GET /projects/{projectId}/runbooks/all API endpoint is being replaced by a new version that omits the ProjectIds query string parameter in future versions of Octopus. It was adopted from an earlier version of the product and is now redundant and potentially confusing. The same functionality is available via the GET /runbooks/all API endpoint, passing relevant Project IDs via the ProjectIds query parameter. If the ProjectIds parameter is not required, the GET /projects/{projectId}/runbooks/all/v2 endpoint should be used instead.

Reporting /reporting/deployments-counted-by-week API endpoint

The GET /reporting/deployments-counted-by-week API endpoint is being removed in future versions of Octopus. It is an old endpoint that is no longer used by any of our supported clients. While there is no direct replacement for this endpoint, much more detailed reporting is available via the Insights feature.

Project level /git/branches API endpoint

The POST method on the /projects/{projectId}/git/branches endpoint for version controlled projects is being removed in future versions of Octopus. The same functionality is available using the /projects/{projectId}/git/branches/v2 endpoint, however, a minor change will need to be made to the request payload. The CurrentBranchName field has been replaced with BaseGitRef. The value of this field should be a fully-qualified git ref (e.g: refs/heads/main for the main branch, refs/tags/v1.2.3 for the v1.2.3 tag, or a commit hash).

Deprecations for 2023.1

Space level /useronboarding API endpoint

The Space level /useronboarding API endpoint is being removed in future versions of Octopus. It was used internally to improve the user onboarding experience. We have since reworked the new user experience and removed the old endpoint. There is no replacement for this endpoint. We do not expect that anyone outside our internal teams has used this endpoint. If you believe this could negatively affect you, please get in touch with our support team.

Unsupported Microsoft DFS configurations

We are updating the supported configurations of Microsoft DFS as shared storage for Octopus Server instances using a High Availability setup. We will continue to support DFS for disaster recovery scenarios, but only in the recommended configuration. You can find more details in our documentation.

Deprecations for 2022.4

Server extensibility

Server extensibility is deprecated and no longer maintained. It will no longer work at the end of 2023. Some of you may have implemented an extension for Octopus Server, however, we would be interested in understanding your requirements better to work towards resolving missing capabilities. Contact us via support team to let us know if this will affect your instance.

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Page updated on Monday, November 20, 2023