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Thanks Jon! This is not an uncommon pattern, it's something I call the "quasi-custom software" problem. I.e. you have a "small" number of customers (dozens not thousands), and each customer gets (1) small customizations to a common platform, and/or (2) customer-driven testing and rollout scheduling.
In BuildMaster, I have seem both patterns; the "customer per app" seems to work the best when you need individual workflows and customizations, and then you can just deploy artifacts from the "core" app.
Having seen this problem for many years, I have yet to see any tool that will "properly" model the situation; Octopus does have an interesting "multi-tenant" feature, but it's not so well suited for individual maintenance workflows. In my mind, this is a key benefit to the "quasi-custom software" model that companies like yours provide.
That said, I think we will have definitely have better handling for this in our next generation of tooling (i.e. Hedgehog).
Projects will lend better to sharing than applications, and one of our usecase for nested projects will be grouping customers in this manner
Universal/romp packages will be able to be bundled, allowing for an easy conceptualization of the "quasi-custom" code as well
It's not a huge departure from BuildMaster now, but it will just be much easier to handle I think!