Octopus for orchestrating AWS CloudFormation stacks deployments?

Hello,
We have use Octopus Deploy for years on our on-prem infrastrucrure on only windows servers and with .NET code.

Now we are in a movement to AWS and I’m confused about how we can continue to make use of Octopus in the much more dynamic environment. Servers on-prem lived for years and now in AWS with our approach of ‘immutable infrastructure’ servers, containers and serverless infra comes and goes every day.

We heavily believes in using AWS CloudFormation for provision infrastructure.

My question is this. Is Octopus the tool for our purpose? We really like it for our current setup on-prem. It has been an enabler for Continuous Delivery for us. Everyone nows how Octopus works and if necessary we don’t want to leave Octopus behind.

Any comments and links to further inspiration on how to continue to make use of Octopus are very welcomed.

Hi Anders,

Thanks for getting in touch! We’re very happy to hear you’ve been enjoying Octopus!

This is a good question to ask as you move to a more immutable infrastructure. This is the general trend the world is following lately, and for good reason. Octopus is always evolving, and we’re continually adding features to handle these dynamic scenarios in an automated way. The short answer is, Octopus is great at that, and many people currently use CloudFormation in this way!

In Octopus 3.4, we added the Elastic and Transient Environments features are designed to handle auto-scaling and Machines with intermittent connectivity.
With Machine Policies, you can automate the removal of Machines once they’re offline for a specified amount of time.
With Project Triggers, you can trigger a new deployment of the latest Release to Machines as they are created.

And that leads to our documentation page on Immutable Infrastructure which brings it all together with a great example using these features in tandem.

Feel free to also check out our blog post written when we introduced these features.

Let us know if you have any further questions at all!

Kenny

Hello Kenneth,

Really thanks for your feedback and the links to further reading. We are up and running with a PoC on how to use Octopus as orcestrator for our AWS Deployments.

Regards - Anders Lundsgard

Hi Anders,

That’s no problem at all, feel free to reach out again if you have any questions in the future. And that’s great to hear you have your PoC up and running!

Best regards,

Kenny