# Best Practices

This section will provide a set of best practices and implementation guides to use with your Octopus Deploy instance.  Like any best practices guide, it won't cover 100% of all scenarios; adapt and modify them to match your company's requirements.  It is also a living document; it will change as new features are added to Octopus Deploy and we help more customers.  

## Whitepapers

For long-form best practices and recommendations please refer to our whitepapers.

- [Best Practices for Self-Hosted Octopus Deploy HA/DR](https://octopus.com/whitepapers/best-practice-for-self-hosted-octopus-deploy-ha-dr)

## Deployments

The Deployments section covers our recommendations and implementation guides for configuring your deployment (and runbook) processes.  They are meant for platform engineers, DevOps engineers, or anyone looking to create golden paths.

The topics covered are:

- [Lifecycles and Environments](/docs/best-practices/deployments/lifecycles-and-environments)
- [Deployment and Runbook Process](/docs/best-practices/deployments/deployment-and-runbook-processes)
- [Variables](/docs/best-practices/deployments/variables)
- [Step Templates and Script Modules](/docs/best-practices/deployments/step-templates-and-script-modules)
- [Notifications](/docs/best-practices/deployments/notifications)
- [Releases and Deployments](/docs/best-practices/deployments/releases-and-deployments)

## Octopus Administration

The Octopus Administration section covers our recommendations and implementation guides for anyone responsible and accountable for administrating Octopus Deploy for their organization.  

The topics covered are:

- [Environments, deployment targets, and target tags](/docs/best-practices/octopus-administration/environments-and-deployment-targets-and-roles)
- [Projects and Project group structure](/docs/best-practices/octopus-administration/projects-and-project-groups)
- [Users, roles, and teams](/docs/best-practices/octopus-administration/users-roles-and-teams)
- [Partition Octopus with Spaces](/docs/best-practices/octopus-administration/partition-octopus-with-spaces)
- [Offload work onto Workers](/docs/best-practices/octopus-administration/worker-configuration)
- [Ongoing maintenance](/docs/best-practices/octopus-administration/ongoing-maintenance)

## Self-Hosted Octopus Deploy

The self-hosted Octopus Deploy section covers our recommendations and implementation guides for our customers who wish to self-host Octopus Deploy on their infrastructure.  

The topics covered are:

- [Installation Guidelines](/docs/best-practices/self-hosted-octopus/installation-guidelines)
- [High Availability](/docs/best-practices/self-hosted-octopus/high-availability)