Reference Architecture Feedback

[mcasperson]

The reference architecture steps provide a collection of projects, feeds, environments, lifecycles, and accounts to demonstrate a best practice deployment process in Octopus.

This discussion is to collect metrics and general feedback for the step.

[mcasperson]

Hi - I'm a solutions architect at Octopus, and I wanted to share some insights into why we developed the Reference Architecture (RA) step and how we hope to incorporate the feedback shared here.

These RA steps are designed to get teams up and running with a real-world deployment process as quickly as possible while also baking in a number of opinions on best practices. The RA steps provide examples of DevSecOps, supporting runbooks, release orchestration, and features like dynamic infrastructure. All of this is created in your own Octopus space, so you can inspect the resources, clone the projects, and build your own pipelines from our examples.

This step is featured in the webinar Deploying to Kubernetes at scale with Octopus - Part 1.

We're also collecting ideas about what best practice means for deployment processes. We may not be able to include all such ideas in RA steps, but we would like to include any that are practical.

We've collected some ideas internally, and those are shown below. If you have any other suggestions, please feel free to leave a comment.

• Deployment steps or runbooks that create PaaS infrastructure
• Smoke tests on deployments
• DevSecOps with sbom scanning to proactively find vulnerabilities
• Support runbooks to get logs, restart services etc
• Triggers to shutdown infrastructure overnight
• Database migration with a report to be generated, tied to Prod env run condition
• Coupled with the DB migration, is a DBA approval step, tied to Prod env run condition
• Manual intervention steps on production
• Microservice deployments
• Orchestration projects using "Deploy a Release" steps
• Notification of success/failure
• ITSM Approval for production (service now usually) with prompted variable for the change number
• If showcasing a tenanted deployment, having a step tied to a tenant tag