Company Spotlight: Octopus Deploy

On February 27, 2024, Octopus Deploy announced the acquisition of Codefresh Inc. Codefresh, founded in 2014 by Oleg Verhovsky and Raziel Tabib, is an Argo maintainer and leader in Kubernetes CD, GitOps, and CI.

The acquisition marks a significant milestone for Octopus, the industry standard for Continuous Delivery (CD). The company strengthens its support for Kubernetes and its commitment to providing the most powerful best-of-breed CD platform for virtual machines and cloud-native enterprise-scale applications.

Octopus Deploy Overview

Octopus Deploy is a company that focuses on enabling reliable, secure, and automated releases of applications and Windows services in various environments. The company's vision centers around creating seamless deployments that bring joy to software teams. It aims for increased deployment frequency and confidence in the process. Octopus Deploy was born out of the need to address challenges faced by software teams in deploying changes efficiently and with confidence. It enables teams to move away from manual and error-prone practices like remote patching of production machines.

Octopus Deploy operates in the realm of DevOps automation tools. It provides solutions for continuous delivery and deployment automation for software teams. The company's platform caters to over 235,000 DevOps engineers and software teams. It facilitates deployments across multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. With a focus on repeatable and reliable deployments, Octopus Deploy stands out for its commitment to enhancing the deployment process through automation and efficiency.

Octopus Deploy establishes itself as a key player in the DevOps industry. It offers innovative solutions that streamline deployment processes, automate routine tasks, and enhance operational efficiency for software teams worldwide.

Who owns Octopus Deploy?

Paul Stovell and Sonia Stovell own the company, bootstrapped since its inception. Redgate Software owns a minority stake, which it invested in the early stages of Octopus's growth.

Business Description

Octopus Deploy was founded in 2012 by Paul and Sonia Stovell with a mission to revolutionize important aspects of DevOps. Before Octopus Deploy became available, software teams had limited tools for release orchestration and DevOps automation. Available tools at that time did not deliver as promised. Octopus Deploy emerged as the first release automation tool to gain widespread adoption by software teams. It offers innovative solutions for automating releases and delivering working software to production.

The mission of Octopus Deploy is to excel in the release, deployment, and operations parts of DevOps, aiming to be "best-in-class" in these areas. The company's philosophy revolves around creating good automation that is repeatable, reliable, and tailored to the needs of software teams. Octopus Deploy focuses on understanding how software teams work and continuously improving its solutions over time.

Octopus Deploy provides a platform that allows software teams to manage releases and automate complex application deployments. It also lets teams handle routine and emergency operational tasks from a single centralized location. The company's key offerings include:

Deployment Process Management: Define deployment processes once with access to over 450 automation step templates covering various technologies.
Environment Configuration: Configure environments and variables to ensure consistent deployment processes across different environments without hardcoding configurations.
Deployment Confidence: Enable self-service deployments for development and testing while ensuring proper testing before promoting releases to production. Features include approvals, human intervention points, and comprehensive deployment logs.

What is Octopus Deploy used for?

Here are some use cases for Octopus Deploy:

automating deployments
managing complex application deployments
automating operational tasks
orchestrating deployment scenarios like rolling, blue-green, canary deployments, multi-tenancy support,
promoting releases with confidence through testing environments before production deployment
storing passwords and secrets securely for use in processes
replacing values in configuration files during deployments without scripting needed
supporting advanced deployment patterns and more

Is Octopus Deploy free?

Octopus Deploy is not free but the company offers a free trial for its platform. However, after the trial period, customers need to purchase a license to continue using the software.

Targeted Customers

Octopus Deploy targets software teams and developers who require efficient, automated, and secure deployment processes for their applications and services. The company's solutions cater to a wide range of industries. These include insurance, cybersecurity, Software as a Service (SaaS), recruitment, hospitality, automotive, healthcare, media and entertainment, Information Technology (IT), e-commerce, energy, utilities, waste, and finance.

The primary customer base of Octopus Deploy consists of software teams and developers from various industries who seek to streamline and automate their deployment processes. These customers typically need reliable, secure, and efficient deployment solutions that can handle complex environments and multiple deployment targets.

Octopus Deploy's marketing strategy focuses on showcasing its platform's capabilities and benefits to its target audience. The company highlights its success stories from customers across different industries. These success stories demonstrate how Octopus Deploy has helped them increase deployment frequency, developer productivity, operational efficiency, and deployment security. Additionally, Octopus Deploy provides detailed documentation and best practices to guide its customers in implementing and optimizing its solutions.

Current Competitors

Octopus Deploy's major competitors in the industry include GitLab, Apache Tomcat, Azure Pipelines, Apache Maven, CircleCI, Jenkins, and IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery.

Octopus Deploy's competitive advantages include its focus on being "best-in-class" in the release, deployment, and operations parts of DevOps. Other advantages include its repeatable, reliable deployments, and its deep understanding of how software teams work. The company's philosophy around good automation and its ability to orchestrate complex deployment scenarios make it a recognized leader in continuous deployment with best-in-class features.

However, Octopus Deploy faces challenges in terms of competition from other DevOps automation tools that offer similar capabilities. The company must continue to innovate and differentiate itself to maintain its competitive edge in the market.

Octopus Deploy has established itself as a category-defining solution for deployment and operations automation. It focuses on solving valuable problems at scale and touching software teams everywhere. The company has surpassed $20M ARR and remains a profitable company, indicating a strong market position.

Octopus Deploy Alternatives

The following offer similar capabilities to Octopus Deploy:

GitLab
Jenkins
CircleCI
GitHub
Azure DevOps Services
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
TeamCity
Bamboo
Spinnaker
Datadog
Anypoint Platform
PyCharm