Octopus Workers

Octopus Deploy is introducing a new feature called Workers in its 2018.7.0 release, aimed at enhancing the setup of deployment infrastructures by offloading certain tasks from the Octopus Server. Workers, which have been part of Octopus since version 3.0 under the name Built-in Worker, allow for execution of deployment steps such as script, Azure, AWS, and Terraform steps on separate machines rather than the server itself. This setup facilitates moving workloads for improved security and performance, and can be scaled using Worker Pools, where Workers are grouped based on deployment needs or tools required. Workers can be Listening Tentacles, Polling Tentacles, or SSH machines, and they serve to execute steps as instructed by the server, without changing the overall orchestration of the deployment process. While Workers provide flexibility, existing users who do not wish to utilize them can continue with their current setup without any disruption, as the default Built-in Worker will still handle tasks unless specified otherwise. The introduction of Workers is designed to offer more control over where and how deployment steps are executed, and future posts will explore their use in scaling and cloud deployments.