Webinar Series

Octopus 101: Runbooks: operations beyond deployment

Deploying code is only part of running a system, and this session covers the part that usually gets figured out the hard way: operations. We'll explain what a runbook actually is, the difference between something you schedule to run automatically and something you trigger on demand, and how to structure a basic emergency or rollback runbook you can trust when things go wrong at 2am. This isn't theoretical; deploying faster and recovering more reliably is one of the biggest reasons people come to Octopus in the first place, and runbooks are the mechanism that makes it real. You'll leave with a template you can adapt to your own team's incident process.

Speakers

John Bristowe

John Bristowe helps engineering teams deliver reliably as a developer advocate at Octopus Deploy. He leads community engagement, creates educational content, and appears regularly on Octopus streams and webinars. Before Octopus, John spent years in developer relations at Microsoft and Telerik/Progress, speaking at industry events and building programs for web and .NET developers. He contributes to Octopus open source, including the Octopus CLI, the Terraform provider for Octopus, and several GitHub Actions that connect build pipelines to deployment workflows. John is based in Robina, Australia, and has been active in the developer community for over two decades.

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Resources

Runbooks overview

Explains what makes runbooks different from deployments: access control, audit trail, and prompted variables for human-in-the-loop operations tasks.

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Deployment and runbook processes best practices

Practical guidance on structuring runbook logic, including when to use conditional run steps versus scripted output variables for decision-making.

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Run a runbook tutorial

Hands-on walkthrough of running your first runbook against an environment, including how Octopus provisions a worker if no deployment target is defined.

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