Apache Tomcat vs. Octopus Deploy

Tomcat is more than enough to deploy most of the mid-end web applications without any problem but for the high-end applications which require high scalability and high availability, which might need some tune-ups with the support of expertise in this regard. Otherwise, you may realize numerous performance issues, memory leaks, server crashes etc.

Incentivized

• The ability to manage different stages and define a workflow is very useful for ops troubleshooting as well as deployment. You can see which version each environment has for each project, and promote or redeploy versions.
• You can view deployment logs and dig deep into problems or long deployment steps.
• Finding old releases can be a pain, and there isn't a good way to compare releases.
• It does not really lend itself well to viewing what the content of a release is further than the version number. Ideally, you would be able to tie a deployment to the builds from the build server as well as specific commits from source control.

Incentivized

• Fast to start up, which is useful when we need to just check that our changes are working correctly.
• Free, which allows us to not be involved with the finance/legal team about using it.
• Bundled with Spring Boot, which makes it even more convenient for our testing.

Incentivized

• Many different platforms, languages, and operating systems are supported. You can deploy to your own server or the cloud. You can deploy to Windows, Linux, etc.
• Many different "step templates" are included, which make it very easy to deploy what you want, how you want. Such as deploying over SSH, FTP, etc.
• Support is very responsive and personable. You won't just be talking to a robot or a script. They will either solve your problem or understand it enough to solve it in a future release.
• Their documentation is well thought-out and very helpful. I have found very few missing pieces.

Incentivized

• tomcat is just part of the J2EE specification implementation, majorly focusing on the servlet (front-end) part. If you requires the full J2ee stack, like EJB support, you need consider other containers like Weblogic
• tomcat's cluster level support is very limited
• tomcat's admin/configuration is not so intuitive, and default logging needs a lot of improvement

Incentivized

• Support for non-Microsoft applications needs to be improved to bring it on par with other comparable automation tools.
• It doesn't yet provide integration options with other IT management tools like JIRA and HP Support to implement continuous delivery and true DevOps processes.
• Support for AWS/Azure has been included very recently and it's not still very mature and feature rich and is expected to improve further in upcoming releases.

Incentivized

We have a huge knowledge of the product within our company and we're satisfied with the performance.

Incentivized

Would be a 10 except for the retirement of the free Community Edition.

Incentivized

Tomcat has a very rich API set which allows us to implement our automation script to trigger the deployment, configure, stop and start Tomcat from the command line. In our projects, we embedded Tomcat in our Eclipse in all of the developer's machines so they could quickly verify their code with little effort, Azure Webapp has strong support for Tomcat so we could move our application to Azure cloud very easy. One drawback is Tomcat UI quite poorly features but we almost do not use it.

Incentivized

Some functionality feels slightly hidden in the menu system. For example: script modules are in the same menu as packages, where I feel that are not related entities. One is code for the deployment, the other is the thing that you are deploying...

Incentivized

Tomcat doesn't have a built-in watchdog that ensures restart upon failure, so you have to provide it externally. A very good solution is java service wrapper. The community edition is able to restart Tomcat upon out of memories exceptions.

Incentivized

Tomcat support to customize memory used and allow us to define the Connection pool and thread pool to increase system performance and availability, Tomcat server itself consume very little memory and almost no footprint. We use Tomcat in our production environment which has up to thousands of concurrent users and it is stable and provides a quick response.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy is a software that runs very effectively, is easy to use, does not require such a high learning curve, provides the necessary tools to carry out the functions it offers, making it a very flexible software, it also allows that can be configured according to the needs of the user and provides integrations with other very advantageous tools since they are carried out in a very favorable way.

Incentivized

Well, in actuality, I have never needed support for Apache Tomcat since it is configured and ready-to-go with no configuration needed on my end.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy support has always been there for us, even when using the free tier, we get responsive hands-on help. We haven't needed to use that level of support since the documentation is clearly written, and help is readily available within the interface itself. Using Octopus Deploy is a truly joyful experience.

Incentivized

Commercial application servers are available that support enterprise application needs, but many times this is overkill for most web applications running in the cloud, particularly for independent software vendors. The capabilities and management tools provided with these applications are superior to Tomcat, but most times unnecessary for the vast majority of web applications developed in Java.

Incentivized

Octopus Deploy was the obvious choice at the time, its strong .net support, robustness, ease of use, and integration into an existing process was a big plus. Also, Octopus Deploy was kind enough to give my organization a not for profit community licence. In addition, the product comes from a local Brisbane based company and it is always good to support local businesses when you can.

Incentivized

It's very easy to add instances to an existing deployment and, using apache with mod proxy balancer, to scale up the serving farm

Incentivized

• It has simplified administration efforts, thus saving much time to focus on other projects and issues.
• It saves us in costs, as there are no licensing requirements.
• It gives us the ability to manage all of our java applets in one place, so as to be able to host both development and production systems on one server.

Incentivized

• Any automated deployment process will save your company a ton of money on testing and bugs. When you don't automate your deployments, you can't be certain that what you are moving between environments is the exact same code with the same or appropriate configuration. What you tested might not be what got deployed.
• We've saved a lot of money using Octopus over the mostly manual process we were using before. We've removed a lot of the errors that come from manual, human intervention.
• Octopus has also allowed us to accomplish more with fewer people. It is easy to bring new people up to speed on the deployment process, and we can be confident of success after very little training.

Incentivized