Automic Continuous Delivery Automation [EOL] Reviews

We use a single application and are trying to deploy it with Automic Release Automation (ARA). It works for one component, so we decided to spread the tool to all our applications and make it the status quo. Today, we are still trying to deploy more applications with this tool.

The main benefit is you can deploy everything with it, but everybody has to need to use this tool in the organization. If some organizations have their own tool, it is hard to make it clear that ARA would be better if everyone used it, because it provides a benefit when you can monitor all the users.

We wanted to put in place release control, release management for our products, which is more centered around a COTS application, into an automated process. That's when we started looking for different tool sets and did a PoC with a couple of vendors. CA Automic stood out there. We started using it for both our service orchestration pieces as well as for release automation.

So far, it's been doing well. In terms of our expectations, it's what we were looking for. There are some angles where we are still refining it or maturing our processes around it, but we have covered a lot in the last about 18 months since we purchased and deployed it. We are about to take about 30 applications under the release automation and going live with a large program. So far, so good, I would say.

I would say our headwind, or our time to market, is reduced considerably. We get more consistent results out of it, because you write one time and once it's automated you expect it to behave the same way every time. And it cut down a lot of re-work for us.

The key use cases will be eliminating manual activities, reducing the risk of missing steps in the deployment. The other thing is to speed up deployment, because the previous way of working was having someone to document the steps, someone to review the steps, and then at the end of the day, someone had to execute those steps within that window.

So far, it has performed well, at least from the "repeatable" perspective. All deployments are repeatable, so when we have issues with deployment, it gives us the opportunity to review and to know where the issues came from. If it is working now and was not working previously, we usually know where it fails.

I think on a day-to-day basis, it has increased the capacity to deploy. We don't have to wait for someone to do something. As long as it changes, then we can always deploy to an environment on demand.

This product has been chosen for automating application releases at a bank, who is our customer. The primary reason was to increase the patterns of releases from 12 a year to more.

It performed really well. The pilot application that we implemented with them at the beginning of the year has been chosen to be a level up agile methodology, and within the three months that they used from the start of the project to going live, they have done approximately 600 deployments. This would have been impossible, given their present capacities.

The bank that we work with happens to be the most innovative bank in Central and Eastern Europe. They describe their main business justification for looking for a product such as this was to maintain a competitive edge and stay on the leading edge of innovation. They have gained efficiency that they cannot achieve in any other way.

We use it to installing a complex application in a legacy world. 

• It supports our legacy, complex environment. 
• It gives us good feedback on visualizations and on how our processes have progressed. 
• We use it as a way to communicate during installations of complex environments to stakeholders.

Application deployment and orchestration.

It has been performing very well for us.

There are not enough hours in a day or week for us to do our jobs. We joke, we call the Automation like another person, or another few people. It lets us multitask much better, gives us a lot more confidence in what we do. At the end of the day we're delivering products that we know are working, as opposed to guessing that they're working.

The primary use case is the implementation of software updates.

We save a lot of money. We have not had so many incidents in terms of correcting the deployment.

It gives us the advantage to release and deploy, so if there are packages of different systems within a release plan, we are able to control and steer our releases so they are stable. This is very beneficial for us.

What we like about the product is that it is more or less an umbrella system that allows us to integrate many different systems into our heterogeneous environment.