> There were plenty of ways to automate deployments for .Net over a decade ago. There's a difference between just pure "automate deployments" and what Octopus

> There were plenty of ways to automate deployments for .Net over a decade ago. There's a difference between just pure "automate deployments" and what Octopus does. While sure there's been tools like NAnt around forever, back when Octopus came out* there wasn't a good easy to use workflow tool for deployment orchestration. Sure, you could use TeamCity/Bamboo/TFS to deploy your code, but it was really focussed on the CI side of things, and the process of building a pipeline was often quite a pain to manage, with them not really understanding 'environments'. You could, and in many cases often did - tell your CI system to deploy direct to a dev/staging environment - but it really wasn't intended for production environments. If you wanted to orchestrate deploying to more than one machine, it was a pain, and doing even tens of machines required that you built a ton of tooling to do this. Octopus comes along and gives us the ability to: - Define environments (ci, dev, staging, preprod, production, etc) - Define a common deployment workflow, with branching/conditionals based on the environment/machine - Define a release workflow, for how a release needed to progress through environments (eg: a release MUST pass deployment on a preprod environment before it can be deployed to production) - Define a release which comprises one or more artifacts (particularly useful if you have multiple parts to your applications - such as a website as well as a service) - Give a good overview of what's deployed where. - Easily roll back a release for an environment - just pick up the previous good release, and re-deploy it to that environment. While sure I could have achieved all of that, the reality was that few people would put all the effort in to building it themselves, AND making it reliable. * = I recall Stovell talking/writing that the whole reason he built Octopus in the first place was because he kept running into the same issues over and over when he was at a consulting firm. There just wasn't any tooling, free or commercial, that would do these things nicely.