Guided Failure does not apply to Acquire Packages or Apply Retention Policy

Legacy Uncategorised
1

Hi,

After recently upgrading from 2.6 to 3.2 it has become painfully apparent that guided failure no longer applies to the native steps.

Previously, Acquire Packages would prompt to retry if it could not find a reference package. In 3.2 it simply fails the release. This requires us to re-start the release, and skip steps, such as email notifications, that had executed before acquire packages.

It’s a similar situation with Apply Retention Policy, which now fails the release outright if it can’t communicate with a tentacle. This happened in a situation where a server was restarted mid-release and the tentacle failed to start. The release was marked as failed after the 80+ critical steps were all executed successfully.

Is there a reason this change was made, and is it in any way configurable?

2

Hi Chris,

Thanks for getting in touch. I’ve spent some time thinking through the situation you’re describing, and I agree, it would be really useful if Package Acquisition and Retention were covered by Guided Failure.

I’m going to investigate this further to understand if it was just an oversight, or if it was deliberately left out from 3.0, and why. When I’ve got more information I’ll get back to you and see about putting a case together to improve the situation.

Hope that helps.
Mike

3

Hi Chris,

I’ve been investigating why Package Acquisition and Retention aren’t covered by Guided Failure in Octopus 3.x and I don’t have a clear answer for you yet. (The people who worked on that area weren’t available yesterday/today)

What I am certain of is we’ve optimized Package Acquisition and Retention significantly for Octopus 3.x, and will do a lot of work in parallel, which complicates Guided Failures. I tested a very crude implementation of Guided Failures for these steps, which worked, but there are complexities about whether we should let somebody ignore Package Acquisition failures.

I’m going to keep following up on this tomorrow and will hopefully have a resolution for you.

Hope that helps!
Mike

4

Hi Michael,

Thanks for getting back to me, to be clear, on package acquisition, it’s retry I’m interested in, not ignore.
We have a separate process to publish packages to a feed in a secure environment. It has happened occasionally that a package was missed.
So previously, if a package was missing, we were able to publish it and then retry acquisition.

Regards,
Chris

5

Hi Chris,

I’ve determined that we unintentionally omitted Guided Failures for Package Acquisition and Retention in Octopus 3.x and have created a GitHub Issue for it.

Hope that helps!
Mike

6

Thanks Michael,

I will keep an eye on this.

Regards,
Chris

7

Hi Chris,

Just wanted you to know we shipped this enhancement in Octopus Deploy 3.2.11: https://octopus.com/downloads/3.2.11

Hope that helps!
Mike