Real Life DevOps - Representing Internal Environment Names With Target Roles

Ryan Rousseau, a Solution Architect at Octopus, explores the challenges and solutions associated with Octopus's multi-tenancy feature in a SaaS environment, where different versions of the same application are deployed to multiple tenants with distinct configurations. The text discusses a specific scenario involving complex internal naming conventions for environments, which led to difficulties in managing lifecycle processes and project overviews due to the excessive number of environments. To address these issues, the solution involves using Target Roles to tag machines with metadata, allowing the consolidation of deployment targets into generic environments like Dev, Test, and Prod, while maintaining visibility of internal environment names. This approach simplifies the project overview and lifecycle management, reducing friction when adding new tenants, and offers a model that can be applied to other projects without creating separate environments for each.