I am very excited to share that Octopus has acquired Codefresh! Our press release has a good summary, but I want to share with you why I’m so excited about Codefresh joining Octopus, what we love about the Codefresh team, and why we think this is excellent news for our customers, Codefresh customers, and the Argo open-source community.
Codefresh brings Argo-based GitOps into the Octopus product family
Codefresh is a leader in Kubernetes CD, GitOps, and CI. Codefresh GitOps is built on top of the popular open-source Argo project, and Codefresh team members are maintainers of Argo. Their broad range of customers means the Codefresh team has more experience than anyone in operating Argo at an enterprise scale.
This acquisition is the next step in strengthening our support for Kubernetes and our commitment to providing the most powerful, best-of-breed Continuous Delivery solution for all of your applications — from heritage applications in data centers, multi-cloud, and hybrid IT infrastructure to containerized, cloud-native applications.
CD or GitOps? Why not both?
To date, Octopus has helped thousands of customers on their containerization journey. Octopus has supported deployments to Kubernetes since 2018, and this year, we continue to have a 40+ person engineering group focused on making Octopus the best CD solution for Kubernetes.
We built Octopus as an artifact-forward CD solution supporting everything from VMs to Kubernetes. With our focus on environment progression, observability, and enterprise compliance, we believe Octopus Deploy is the best tool for most teams continuously delivering applications to Kubernetes at scale.
At the same time, some teams and application architectures benefit from — or simply prefer — a GitOps-style approach. Argo has become the most popular open-source GitOps tooling, but many teams often find the Argo projects alone fall short of a complete Continuous Delivery pipeline.
Codefresh seamlessly blends the best features of Argo and so much more into an enterprise-ready unified CI/CD platform. A great example here is visibility: with Argo, when you release a new image of your application, the Git commit monitored by Argo will tell you the version of the new container image that should run in production. But what Jira tickets or code commits were included in that release? These are the kinds of visibility issues Codefresh has gracefully solved.
We’ll continue to invest in the Argo project
Like our customers, we care greatly about Kubernetes and the cloud-native movement. Octopus Cloud, our SaaS offering, has run on Kubernetes since 2019. As active members and sponsors of the Linux Foundation and the CD Foundation since 2020, and more recently, the CNCF, we are committed to advancing Argo-based Kubernetes deployments and GitOps-based CD. This commitment will deepen with Codefresh co-founders, Raziel Tabib and Dan Garfield, joining our leadership team.
In 2024, we have seen many venture-backed, open-core businesses collapse, leaving the projects they maintained — and organizations they supported — with an uncertain future. Our size and profitability mean we can continue to maintain Argo and even deepen our maintenance investment, ensuring the project has a viable future and enterprise-ready offering.
How it happened
There’s a popular conception that acquisitions happen because financial types engineer some kind of 1+1=3 logic. In our experience — we’ve explored a bunch over the years when trying to find ways to address customer challenges — they start excellent on paper but always fall down at the human level. The people at the other company seem nice enough, but would they be great Octonauts? I can probably work with them, but am I excited about it? As a result, the bar is incredibly high.
I was in Chicago for KubeCon last year with our team where we were showing customers how Octopus can help Kubernetes users with environment progression, observability, and enterprise compliance. On the first day, I walked past the Codefresh booth on the way to ours, and I recognized the Codefresh CEO, Raziel Tabib, from his LinkedIn photo, and we started a conversation. It’s always fascinating to meet other founders in our space, and Raziel and I had never met before, so agreed to get a coffee. At that first coffee, it was clear Raziel and I shared the same vision for the industry and our customers' challenges. It was as if we’d been walking parallel but similar journeys.
We both believe that software teams fundamentally exist to create valuable software, which is only valuable when it’s running in production and so the CD pipeline is the beating heart of any software team. Yet for many companies, the CD pipeline is still a source of pain; clogged up with slow builds and pipeline sprawl, loss of visibility, and propped up with home-grown “shadow” CD solutions bolted onto CI pipelines.
What really brought it together was when other Octonauts met other Codefreshers as we further explored the idea of acquisition. The overwhelming reaction from Octonauts was, “we’d absolutely hire that person; they’d make a great Octonaut.”
Any product embodies the lived experiences of the people who built it. Octopus has been helping thousands of customers for over 10 years to solve some of the most complex CD challenges, and that’s reflected in thousands of big and small ways in our product. Codefreshers have been solving similar challenges for a similar length of time, and those learnings and ideas are embodied in their product. Bringing both groups together to compare notes and continue to push the state of the art in CD is very exciting.
Octopus is now the largest best-of-breed CD vendor
With Codefresh joining Octopus, we are now proud to say we have:
- Best-of-breed CD, GitOps, and CI under one roof
- Over 4,000 customers
- Over 270 Octonauts (all Codefreshers will be continuing as employees of Octopus)
- Over $60M USD in revenue
- Been profitable for 10 out of the past 11 years, with 2023 being our best year ever, which fuels our further product investment
That makes us the most complete best-of-breed CD solution in the market today with the most guaranteed future. This makes Octopus very unique. Our size combined with our long history of profitability, means that we are a sustainable and reliable choice in good markets and bad.
We are also very proud of the culture we have built at Octopus (you can read more about it in our Octopus Handbook) as employees who are being well taken care of pour the same dedication into customer care.
To all Octopus and Codefresh customers - thank you for your continued loyalty, support, and feedback.
We are excited about our future together.
Happy deployments!
