The deployment path for software development can be a long and winding road with myriad steps along the way for testing and the coming together of the work of many different teams. We are often asked whether Octopus Deploy or Azure DevOps would be the best deployment tool. The answer isn’t that simple though, as they both have different roles to play and varying potential benefits to your project.
Octopus Deploy is an automated deployment and release management tool used by continuous delivery teams worldwide. It helps teams to manage releases, automate complex application deployments and automate routine and emergency operations tasks.
As the company suggests: “You already have a source control system and a build server. Octopus doesn't replace these, we turbocharge them. We allow the build server to focus on what it does best: compiling code and running tests, while Octopus takes care of deploying and promoting releases between environments, automating deployments, and automating the operations tasks that keep the software running.”
Octopus Deploy works with your build server to enable reliable, secure, automated releases into test, staging and production environments.
Azure DevOps Server is a Microsoft product that provides version control, reporting, requirements management, project management (for both agile software development and waterfall teams), automated builds, lab management, testing and release management capabilities. It is useful for teams who want to share code, track work and ship software.
Some experts would describe Octopus Deploy as providing ‘deployment as a service’, while Azure DevOps offers ‘project management’.
There’s nothing to stop you utilising Azure DevOps for every step but you could dove tail it with Octopus Deploy tools. It is not simply a case of using one or the other. In fact, as a project moves across different teams, you could switch in and out of the two.
As the Octopus team explains: “Octopus complements the Azure DevOps suite of services and we recently shipped an update to our Octopus Deploy integration for Azure DevOps to make the integration even better. It’s very common for teams to use Azure Pipelines to build their apps and use Octopus to deploy them. This approach takes advantage of the strengths of both tools and together, they enable teams to get better end-to-end visibility into their software pipelines from idea to production.”
“It’s common for teams using Azure DevOps to use its work item tracking, (including Kanban boards and backlogs) to plan and organise their projects. This update brings support to identify work items associated with Azure DevOps builds and Octopus releases, giving end-to-end traceability from work item to deployment. You can also click through to Azure DevOps for more information. This can help identify changes that introduced bugs into releases.”
If you want to find out more about how Octopus Deploy can benefit your project, then give our team at Lake Solutions a call.