Octopus santa driving sleigh, delivering packages around the world to different houses surrounded by trees and a snowman.

'Tis the week before Christmas...

Andy Corrigan

'Tis the week before Christmas, for many in DevOps,
Soon not a sprint will start, not even at Microsoft.
Late updates will commit, last-minute deployments will get done,
And those who celebrate the holidays will gear up for some fun.

So what better time to reflect and celebrate,
To think of the year behind, and how we improved deployment rates.
2023 has been a raging success,
So let's look at all the things Octopus did, that only it does best.

How we improved Octopus

We like solving problems for software teams,
And we work hard on new features so you can deploy at great speeds.
If multi-tenancy, Kubernetes, or operations get you blue,
In 2023, Octopus might have released the right features for you.

This year, we invested our time heavily in 3 core areas: Kubernetes, tenanted deployments, and improvements that help you scale.

Here are some of the standout features and changes we made to Octopus in 2023:

Better Kubernetes deployments

Better tenanted deployments

Reduced manual intervention

  • Step retries - Automatically retry deployment steps to reduce manual intervention when connectivity problems strike.
  • Step timeouts - Set steps to timeout to help catch the times when processes hang.
  • Resilient Tentacles - Tentacles now automatically retry after communications failures.

More integration

Great UI changes:

  • Version-controlled variables - Manage variables alongside your deployment process code and scope them to environments, roles, targets, and more.
  • Reprioritize tasks - Easily shuffle tasks around in runbooks and deployments as priorities change.
  • New onboarding process - Our improved onboarding helps you get to grips with Octopus faster.

But wait, there's more!

These are just our standout updates. Check out our What's new? page to see more changes and improvements to Octopus this year.

Next year's planned improvements include:

  • A new, dedicated Kubernetes Tentacle to deploy to many clusters without compromising on enterprise-grade security
  • GitHub App to connect Octopus and GitHub without managing credentials
  • Resilient Deployment Pipeline to scale to 1000 concurrent deployments and more
  • Config as Code for Octopus Runbooks
  • Terraform Provider enhancements
  • Streamlined project setup
  • More usability, performance, and small improvements that make for happy deployments

See our roadmap to stay in the loop about what's coming next.

We travelled the world to meet you

We travelled the world, though slower than Saint Nick,
To meet you in person at industry gigs.
We showed off Octopus, talked shop, and heard of your pains,
We learned lots, made friends, and can't wait to do it again.

We found so much value in meeting everyone at many of this year's industry events, including:

  • NDC London and Oslo
  • KubeCon Europe and North America in Amsterdam and Chicago
  • GitHub Universe in San Francisco
  • DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas
  • Gartner Sydney

We also loved talking about Octopus and sharing our experiences at events like:

  • Web Directions
  • ProductTank
  • Women in Tech
  • Google Developer Group
  • SSW .NET Group
  • Cloud Native Summit

A heartfelt thanks to anyone who stopped to talk or heard what we had to say. If you're a regular attendee of these events, we look forward to seeing you in person again next year!

Make sure to keep track of Octopus events and webinars to see more of us in the future.

We launched our own event with SHIPPED23

Not just content with our travels, we held an event of our own,
With SHIPPED23, where we shared what we know.
We talked software delivery in all the ways we could glean,
Bringing the smartest of Octopus right to your screen.

On November 15, we held our own virtual conference in the form of SHIPPED23.

SHIPPED23 featured talks covering many aspects of software delivery, from concepts and best practices to Octopus itself. Our talks included:

  • Accelerating software delivery at scale
  • What's new for Octopus and what's on the roadmap
  • How we're scaling Octopus Cloud
  • Real-world release pipelines with GitHub Actions and Octopus
  • Beyond GitOps: How to apply Kubernetes best practices to enterprises' reality
  • Tracking, predicting, and preventing performance regressions in Octopus
  • New features for tenanted deployments
  • DORA, DevOps, and deployments
  • Multi-tenancy architecture lessons learned

Watch the event via our YouTube playlist:

We have plenty of other great videos on the Octopus Deploy YouTube channel too, including guides, industry talking points, and more.

Our YouTube channel also hosts our podcasts, Deploy on Friday - a weekly show about all things Octopus, hosted by John Bristowe and Jim Pelletier - and Inside DevOps.

Our website continues to improve

Octopus's website is a wonderful tool,
It's where we give updates and explain our value to you.
Its development is an ongoing task,
But we made massive steps in the year that's just passed.

In late 2022, we gave our homepage a new look, but our work didn't stop there.

We've been redeveloping our website over the entire year, so it better explains how Octopus simplifies enterprise, tenanted, and Kubernetes deployments.

We have new pages that explain how Octopus helps with specific deployment strategies:

We have new and updated feature pages:

We provided tools and specialist content that help you understand more about deployments, DevOps, and our value:

We also told the Octopus story in new ways:

2023 in stats

Like many in tech, we love some good stats,
So we hit up our experts whose data we track.
From all of the areas of which we hold dear,
Here are some facts from another great year.

To finish, here are some fun stats about Octopus's year (at the time of writing):

  • Our customers completed over 44,626,113 deployments.
  • Our customers ran over 600,000 Kubernetes steps each month.
  • We archived over 234,621,521 audit events in Octopus Cloud with our new audit log archiving feature.
  • We had 749,452 pageviews on our blog. Checking Kubernetes pod CPU and memory was our most popular post, with 34,405 views.
  • We ran over 1.1 million build and test jobs while working on Octopus Server, which is roughly 48 years of compute time! Octopus Server also had the following code changes:
    • 14,788 files changed
    • 391,156 lines added
    • 190,860 lines deleted
    • 69,065 lines modified
  • Our support team:
    • Received 4,984 support requests
    • Sent 15,267 responses
    • Averaged a response time of 18 minutes for tickets for our enterprise customers, and 48 minutes for everyone else
  • Our People and Culture team's hiring process saw:
    • 12,293 applications
    • 1,101 people interviewed
    • 40 accepted offers

Happy deployments to all, and to all a good night!

As you can see, Octopus had a terrific year, and we can't wait to keep helping software teams with complex deployments in 2024.

Just a reminder that staff at Octopus take a well-earned rest over the holidays. Fret not, we'll still be available to support you if needed.

Happy deployments!

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