Octopus Deploy announced today it has tightened the integration between its automated deployment platform and GitHub Actions continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform.
Harsh Sabikhi, senior vice president of revenue for Octopus Deploy, said GitHub Actions for Octopus Deploy v2 adds support for a push-build-information-action capability GitHub added to its platform that enables DevOps teams to track commits, builds and issues. That information is now also synchronized with a DevOps Insights tool from Octopus Deploy that surfaces metrics based on the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics defined by Google.
Other capabilities added to the integration include support for semantic versioning release tags within workflows, job summaries and a revamped user interface that makes GitHub easier to access from within Octopus Deploy.
Sabikhi said that while GitHub Actions provides some deployment capabilities, the automation platform created by Octopus Deploy automates application release management across multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments. GitHub Actions is optimized for managing CI processes within the context of a Git-based workflow emanating from a cloud service managed by GitHub, he added.
The integration with GitHub Actions makes it simpler to extend those Git-based workflows across multiple deployment platforms, noted Sabikhi.
GitOps is, essentially, a more opinionated approach to DevOps that relies on an instance of the open source Git repository as the single source of truth about the environment rather than a set of application or server configuration files. GitHub views GitOps as a means of extending a code repository into the realm of DevOps workflows using the GitHub Actions platform.
As organizations embrace GitOps, however, many are finding it advantageous to more loosely couple CI and CD platforms. Integrated CI/CD platforms have been around now for more than a decade, but few organizations have been able to truly automate the delivery of applications using those platforms. Platforms such as Octopus Deploy have been created from the ground up to specifically manage deployments of applications. In addition to GitHub Actions, Octopus Deploy also provides integrations with multiple other CI platforms to enable DevOps teams to mix and match CI platforms as they best see fit, said Sabikhi.
It’s not clear how many DevOps teams are willing to acquire a separate CD platform, but as applications become more challenging to build and deploy in the cloud-native era many organizations are revisiting the DevOps processes they used to build and deploy monolithic applications. The challenge is many of them have spent years defining workflows based on legacy CI/CD platforms, so there is a lot of existing inertia that would need to be overcome when adopting a dedicated CD platform.
It’s clear that CD is finally becoming more achievable using platforms that automate much of the process. Each DevOps team will need to decide how many staff they want to dedicate specifically to managing those CD platforms; the pace at which applications are being deployed should accelerate as application release management becomes more automated.
