Why we chose Kubernetes, Linux, and .NET Core for Octopus Cloud

Octopus Cloud underwent a significant transformation journey to optimize costs and improve performance, starting with its initial launch in July 2018 on AWS, where hosting costs far exceeded revenue due to a dedicated VM architecture per customer. Confronted with the need to reduce costs and enhance provisioning speed, the company explored various compute options, ultimately deciding to rebuild its platform from the ground up by transitioning to Kubernetes, Linux, and .NET Core, and switching from AWS to Azure. This shift allowed Octopus Cloud to reduce per-customer hosting costs by over 50% and cut provisioning times from over 10 minutes to less than 30 seconds, demonstrating marked improvements in performance and efficiency. The decision to embrace Kubernetes and .NET Core was driven by the desire to leverage existing internal expertise, avoid vendor lock-in, and align with the broader industry trend towards containerization, despite the challenges of migrating from a Windows-based system to a Linux-based, containerized environment.