Team City or Octopus build agents behind firewalls

Question

New to TeamCity and Octopus but these look like two products that could help us in our continuous delivery efforts. We're deploying from our cloud servers to client servers hidden away behind the company firewall. No chance of establishing a http connection to them but they can see our servers. The build agents I've looked at all seem to require two way connections. Are there agents or some other solution that only requires one way connectivity up to our servers?

Thanks in advance.

Tim

Answer 1

Octopus Deploy only uses a one-way connection:

 Deployment server (Octopus) ----> Deployment agent (Tentacle)

The Tentacle agent listens on a TCP port which the Octopus server connects into. The communication is done using wsHttpBindings with a two-way trust relationship, but the actual communication is a normal one-direction client-server model. More details are available on this page.

If I've read your question correctly, it sounds like you need the communication to happen in the opposite direction - your deployment agents should connect to your deployment server, to bypass firewall rules.

It was actually an explicit choice behind Octopus not to use this model, and I've written about that decision in a blog post. I hope that helps.