Nolio Release Automation Reviews

We were running approximately 40 manual steps, and we're getting this down to two manual steps, thereby alleviating some of the copy-paste errors, some of the transposition errors that we're currently doing that affect our customers.

For my organization, in particular, it’s going to improve our throughput. We're not going to have delays in testing, because we had some sort of manual entry error, some transposition error. We should be able to release our software to the customer in a much more efficient fashion.

As far as the role this solution has played in our continuous delivery journey, right now, we're just a very small fish in a big company. We do touch into a lot of other departments. Working with this for my group, if it becomes successful, we can start integrating and helping other parts of the organization also automate.

We don't have a lot of compliance and governance within my group. However, we do a lot of audit and we have a lot of details that we have to track. This is going to help us keep on top of those details; keep that continuity of data; keep us really on track for being able to give a better solution to our customers.

Indicating room for improvement is difficult, because we're so immersed in what we're doing right now. There's a lot of things that we can see that can be included. Working with our consultant, he's helping us address some of those issues, especially with tracking and capturing metrics. Our metrics are for very short time periods; capturing those metrics and being able to present them in a way that my management can understand.

We started using it in about March 2016, with our planning and our proto building.

I believe it will be stable. We're still finishing up some introductory things. We haven't done our full release yet. We're in a soft test process right now. I'm starting to see some very positive results with all of that.

What we're looking at is a very small part. From some of the information at a recent CA conference, I can see where we can expand. We can expand into our test organization. We can expand into our further release organization. I think there's a lot of scalability.

I've not had any problems with the tech support at CA. We've got a consultant that's come in. He's been invaluable. We've done some training. We're working right now on mentoring some of my own people to start picking up some of those tasks, so I have not had any issues with CA support.

My organization has wanted to invest in a solution for my group for a couple of years now. It was a matter of just researching, getting the right players in, and bringing in the right development people to start on this. I started on this process about two years ago. We finally got the team set up so that we could move forward on it at the end of 2015. Then we started full blast ahead in January 2016.

Initial setup is a bit complex. We also had to build a front-end solution at the same time as implementing the CA and CDD. What we're doing with CDD is kind of unique. There's been some complexities. There's a lot of business rules surrounding the manual processes; getting all those captured; and then being able to program for them. Right now, we're looking at the 80%. Then we'll be going into an optimization come the beginning of 2017.

We checked out, from my point of view, several vendors, but we have a VP that wanted an enterprise solution. We already had a relationship with CA. He felt that this was something that CA could do for us. We met with them. We feel that they're doing a good job.

I never give out perfect ratings. I think it's going to be a good, stable product. I know CDD's fairly new. We're doing new things with it. It's exciting that it can be scalable enough to accommodate our part of the production.

• Zero-code deployment process design: With this feature, it's easy to share, discuss, and debug the deployment logic with non-technical people.
• Easy to orchestrate activities across multiple servers.
• Easy to synchronize the changes so they happen at the right time in relation to each other and even to pass information between those servers.
• Has a vast library of standard actions and action packs that cover 99% of use cases of the customers.
• Has REST APIs and plugins to integrate with external systems such as Jenkins, ServiceNow, Puppet, and Chef.
• Has a manifest-driven deployment and artifact package to easily reuse the same artifacts.
• Reuses the flow logic in multiple applications for deployment on different environments and shared components.

With CA Release Automation, the customers whom I worked with were able to:

• Increase the number of deployments
• Increase the deployment speed
• Increase the number of concurrent deployments
• Lower the error rate
• Improve the visibility and the reliability of the deployment process

I would like to see:

• Improving the shared component features
• Porting the versioning feature of the shared components to the classic components

We have used this solution for about two years.

The product was very stable and reliable. This was also the case in big installations with a lot of agents involved, thanks to the high availability architecture.

There were no scalability issues. It was designed with scalability in mind. It's easy to manage a big number of agents by adding a new execution server to the architecture.

The technical support is very good. They are always responsive and helpful, and try to resolve the issues promptly.

The initial setup is almost straightforward. The important thing is correctly sizing the architecture based on the number of agents to deploy.

I recommend trying to build the continuous delivery pipeline, step-by-step. You can do this by integrating the external software solutions for building and testing, such as Jenkins Automation Testing.

Using a VPL to configure a release process is a valuable feature. A VPL is a visual programming language where you program visually instead of normal coding.

It has improved the working of our organization by:

• Accelerating the release development process
• Enabling smaller development teams to achieve faster development times

The level of abstraction in the VPL needs to improve. There needs to be some improvement in the technical issues, in order to better relate with the machine's infrastructure and network support.

For it to work properly, a VPL must abstract the concept to where it applies, which in this case is a release process. Although in my opinion it is very nice to see it applied in this process in the market, I found, however, that it still needed to improve and abstract more in the aspects of infrastructures, where they were applied. This could make the process more easier for the batch setting variables for an instance.

I have used this product for approximately six months.

Some deployment issues were experienced when dealing with some unexpected network case's architecture.

The technical support is good from CA's part.

I worked as a consultant, so we had very different tools applied. It all depended on the client itself.

It ended a bit more complex than it should. The variables customization per environment formed a cluster of boxes, in the beginning, for instances.

We implemented this product through a vendor team in order to simplify the process and abstract the maximum from the old ways of the release process.

Look at it as a fresh start and a "clean" environment without any need of prior release methods. You can use it to simplify most of the processes.

It is a good product but still needs some improvement.

I really appreciate the Deployment Pipeline where you can see the environment and release version artifact that was deployed and whether it was successful (green) or failed (red) for each application.

The release deployment pipeline in CA RA is the most valuable feature of them all, as it shows the environment and the release version currently deployed for each application.

It has enabled us to provide continuous delivery and deployment for all 4 environments (DEV, QA, stage, prod) with promotion steps for each environment.

I don't think there are enough action packs for each App Deployment function.

There is also a lack of online documentation or step-by-step guides, especially for the CA RA product.

I have used it for 8 months.

We encountered no stability issues.

We did encounter some scalability issues. Only active/passive mode is available for this product and not high availability mode like other products.

We found the technical support to be very low level.

I used Puppet Labs as a configuration management tool and compared it to CA Release Automation. The products are completely different in features, functions and methodology.

The initial CA RA setup is complex for getting you started but after you understand the way it distributes artifacts to its agent and the deployment phases, it then becomes quite easy to handle.

It has its cost and can be considered to be more expensive compared to other solutions.

We did not evaluate other options.

Learn your application's components (backend, frontend, DB) before you start working with CA RA. You also need to teach CA RA the artifact type and version for each deployment. It is best for you to first manually deploy then teach CA RA how to automate it.

For our team, CA RA has made the one-click deployment a reality. It provides a web-based GUI with a convenient dashboard, Release Operations Center (ROC) to manage deployments, and agent health checks.

CA RA integrates seamlessly with multiple front-end, DB, and MW technologies. The time savings for repetitive tasks is tremendous.

It also provides role-based, user administration where the DEV and QA were given access to use CA RA as a self-service tool. They use it to perform the deployments to their environments in the exact same way as the Release Ops team would deploy it to the controlled environments.

This helps isolate any issues that can occur in controlled environments to artifacts/ENV configurations. This helps us to catch issues quicker and improve our delivery times.

The automation designer GUI slows down the host when it is launched. The reporting feature is not excellent. You cannot import/export the workflows effectively between multiple CA RA environments.

Additionally, this product is only able to automate the technology actions when the technology vendor provides CLI, web service calls, and an API for automation. It does not have the capability to connect to the GUI directly and perform sequential actions.

I have had extensive, hands-on implementation experience with this solution for about four years.

We did have stability issues. The tool slows down often. If any agents were to go offline or are in a hung state, we do not discover this until after the deployment has been triggered. The workaround for this is to leverage a third-party monitoring tool to ensure that it polls the agents 24/7 and takes the necessary configured action if the agent were to have any issues.

Scalability was never an issue with this product. However, my experience with the product is limited to having up to 1000 target deployment servers registered on the tool. No redesign is expected as we continue to add servers after the initial PoC of a dozen servers.

The technical support is very prompt and knowledgeable. They go the extra mile to ensure that you meet your end result.

We used legacy UNIX deployment scripts to perform automated deployments through CLI. Maintaining the scripts was a tremendous overhead for the release operations team. These scripts had to be regularly updated to ensure that they can deploy the latest and greatest technologies to which the company was switching.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

This solution is pricey compared to its peers.

We evaluated XL Deploy and UrbanCode Deploy.

This product has become invaluable in terms of saving time and improving time to market. If these are your pain points, you must include this product on your shortlist.

I like the shared components and version control.

Shared components:

In my work, we have about 30 Java standalone applications, although every application is different and has specific behaviors. Nonetheless, I realized that all of them can be installed in the same way. I had to design only one flow for all of them. I found that the "Shared components" feature helps me.

I had to create my common flow like a "shared component". For every application, I only had to "import" that shared component. Another amazing thing was that if I had to change something in my shared component, I could easily reflect my changes to all of the applications.

Version Control:

The version control is important because the changes that I make in my shared component can be controlled. I can decide which version will work with which Java application.

Now we have automatic installations and it is very easy to promote the installation between environments.

I would like to see a better way to re-use a task. If you are not aware of how to use and re-use the task, you can mix their content or lose data.

When you are creating a new flow, you should reuse a previously created task. My advice is to create a new task, even if it is similar to the one you already created. Every task has specific information. When you try to reuse it, you can overwrite the specific data from another flow that is using the same task.

We have used this solution for six months.

There are some stability issues. Sometimes, the server crashes or throws out of memory. And the import/export function sometimes doesn’t work.

There have been no scalability issues.

The technical support is excellent.

The installation was straightforward. Although we faced some problems, we realize that our flow could be improved.

Don't reuse actions. It is better to create a new one. Otherwise, you could lose data.

This product provides pre-built action packs for many of the most popular platforms and appliances. The product allows users to create custom actions when action packs are not yet available. This allows us to leverage this studio across our entire organization.

We have seen significant improvements in efficiency through the use of CA Release Automation by allowing us to standardize our deployment processes and automate those processes. This has decreased time-to-market for several of our teams and allowed our personnel to spend more time working on higher value tasks.

The learning curve for this tool is somewhat steep. While setting up a basic deployment process is simple, improving those processes to include integration into monitoring tools or implementing complex deployment processes can be a challenege. Making the product more intuitive, specifically around process design, would be a great improvement.

I have used this product for two years. we have implemented automated deployment processes for several platforms and continue to look for more platforms to leverage this tool against.

None

There were no issues with stability.

We discovered that administrators can build application deployment processes in certain ways that will cause deployment agents to get hung if you attempt concurrent deployments to the same physical hosts. This has more to do with the learning curve on how to build the processes than the product itself.

Six out of ten.

I would rate technical support with a 6 out of 10. A great deal of the support comes from the user community. This is valuable, but sometimes they are not as well informed as an SME.

We used several different solutions to achieve similar results. One of the biggest advantages for us in choosing this solution was the ability to incorporate, build, deploy, and test functionality in a single pane of glass.

The initial setup of the tool itself was fairly straightforward. Setup of the individual application designs requires a comprehensive understanding of the application involved as well as getting everyone to agree on a standardized build and deployment process.

Licensing concerns play an important role in how you standardize your deployment process. Where possible, take advantage of clustering capabilities that allow you to deploy to a single host and push the deployments out to all the members of the cluster.

We had an environment where each development team had their own set of tools for building packages and all deployment was manual. The evaluation of this product included reviewing the capabilities of Jenkins and Visual Studio.

When engaging technical services to assist in implementing this product, make sure you have thought out your requirements and documented them very specifically. Ask for reference calls with other customers to get their feedback on common pitfalls.

I really appreciate how easy and fast it is develop a flow that can deploy artifacts and applications.

As a simple example, we had a manual process to publish static files on a web server. Due to the large number of files and the need to do manual work using another tool, it used to take us six hours to complete it. With this tool, it now it takes us around five minutes.

CA Release Automation has a large number of actions and it fits the needs in 99% of the cases. However, sometimes a specific function/behavior is needed and we are forced to call an external command to solve the problem. For example, in regards to the SVN actions, I had a problem where I needed to check for lock and unlock, if needed. However, I could only achieve this by using an external script.

I have used this solution for one year.

The product is pretty stable.

It is possible to have a lot of execution servers, but you can’t put them in a balanced pool of servers. In the majority of cases, agents will be used to reach one specific machine.

When executing a remote command, such as JDBC, it is ineffective to use only one specific server. This will be a single point of failure.

I would give technical support the highest possible rating.

We previously used a different solution.

CA Release Automation really makes life easier as follows:

• Has a large number of available actions.
• Has deployment pipeline and approval gateway features that increase security to the deployment flow.
• Integrates with service desk tools.

It is really straightforward to install and configure. However, it takes some days to fully understand how to properly use the tool due to the large number of features.

There are cheaper, or even free tools, but I guarantee that getting this solution is worth the price.

We evaluated Bamboo, HP Codar, and Serena Deployment Automation.

Try to study every single feature. This will make it possible to develop really professional deployment flows.