Nolio Release Automation Reviews

The valuable features are:

• Ability to keep the map of different environments in a single tool.
• Ability to design and manage DevOps activity from a graphical point of view.
• Ability to manage large installations with more than 5,000 servers due to its 100% scalable architecture.

This has helped our organization with several kinds of projects:

• Projects with more than 5,000 servers and daily deployments.
• Projects in which we have to manage the deployment in a cloud environment based on the monitoring. As the number of users grows, we must deploy a cloud environment and deploy the applications. If the number of users decreases, we have to uninstall the applications and release the cloud infrastructure.
• Deployment of applications in a continuous integration environment, including deployment, QA, pre-production, and production environments.

I would like to see integration with other technologies, such as Docker.

We have used this solution for over five years.

There have been stability issues, but they will be solved with the collaboration of CA teams.

There have been no scalability issues. It is very important to do a correct design of the architecture ahead of time.

The technical support is good.

I used open source solutions like Puppet and Chef. These solutions require a high level of expertise and are difficult to maintain in large installations. For this kind of project, it is better to use commercial tools, such as CA products.

The installation was simple. But if you want to use the tool in large installations, there are some tricks you must know.

It is an expensive tool and the licensing model is difficult to sell.

We looked into open-source tools, XebiaLabs, and IBM.

Begin with a little project and grow it progressively. If you need a number of projects, get help from professional services.

CA RA supports most of the OSs (unix, Linux, Windows) out there used in corporate environments. So one of the most valuable features is flexibility, as you can deploy virtually any app on any OS using this platform.

It has reduced deployment times from nearly a couple of hours to around a couple of minutes, especially on production environments.

Tags are virtual snapshots of different deployment processes. Over time, if you often update your processes, it gets hard to track what exact changes were made between the different tags of the same process. This functionality is not working. Therefore, it would be great if the vendor could improve the processes tag comparison feature for better process version control.

I have been using CA Release Automation since 2014.

I have not encountered any particular issues, as all I had to do is the agent software installation and configuration. The vendor and a supporting team installed the system servers.

Unfortunately, all we used for deployments previously was custom scripts, so I can’t compare here anything.

When it comes to agent install, it’s pretty straightforward. I can’t comment on the server installs.

A vendor team installed the server-side software.

It is a really great and flexible tool for corporate-grade deployments, but I would strongly recommend investing in training sessions from the vendor. It's a steep learning curve if you will have to learn the tool on your own.

As an engineering program manager, I was responsible for making sure that we're taking the 43 steps that are our manual process, and automating those. That actually takes our software delivery to our set-top boxes and automates the process to send this technology up to the satellites and down to set-top box. It's total automation of a manual process.

Basically, right now, it takes our software configuration management team and our download configuration management team 4-5 hours to be able to encapsulate the software with the necessary header information to be able to send it to the satellites, so that it then could go down to the set-top boxes. Through the automation process, we're trying to reduce that to a 30-minute process.

How the product could really improve is when we were actually given the product and started to implement it, we were looking to CA to provide best-case scenarios. But because we're so unique, we had no templates to work off of. CA could really work together with their other product lines to give us guidance on governance on how to implement the product; that would be great.

We've been implementing this solution for approximately one year.

What we actually did is, we took our software and moved it to another location that makes it incorporated into our infrastructure up at the up-link center. By doing that, the stability of the solution allows us to be able to do more real-time work, rather than trying to have to do manual entry.

Unlike a lot of the different CA Release Automation products, we actually are very unique in what we're doing. We're actually having to take the software and put into steps that allows us to stop the software automatically, send it out for approvals, get all the approvals signed and back to us, then continue the automation process.

The scalability allowed us to be able to do that. It also allowed us to be able to run multiple processes at the same time. Again, being able to look at our product and being able to target specific set-top boxes or groups of boxes.

Tech support at CA has been very good during our implementation process. When we have technical questions that we need to get back into engineering because we are a very unique type of implementation, they've been very responsive.

EchoStar actually has CA Technologies Release Automation implemented in another team, so we're partnered with the other team. We looked at the product in comparison to building custom applications ourselves and found that using CA technology was the best solution.

What I look for from a vendor is somebody with the technical skills that has the knowledge of the best solutions, best practices; and that has a support team that we can draw on, call on, and that we can then use as mentors as we bring our team up to speed.

We work with CA's technology group for implementation. The setup was actually very straightforward. Because of the components we have involved, we're doing a lot of customizations to the product and then, again going back to scalability, allowed us to scale to those customizations.

It is very customizable; it's very easy to use, to be able to actually put the product together, to build those different workflows that we needed to build; and also with its ability of having the technical staff.

The continuous-delivery journey is that we are going from a total manual process to total automation. Our next phases would be including being able to actually automate the sending of the data up to the satellites, down to set-top boxes.

For governance, we set up a list of metrics for program managers, for senior managers, and for department managers; for time to delivery of the software; and for error reduction. We're trying to reduce our error rate from 33% errors on our software builds, down to 0. We're using the metrics for that. We're also, again, using our metrics to look at the delivery time.

• UI-based orchestration
• Ease of use of the application from anyone who is technical to completely non-tech folk
• Great visualization and consolidation of reports across the organization

• Better integration with new-age tools
• Open-source integrations
• Establish a niche with newer players like Chef and Ansible

We have used Release Automation for 6-7 years.

It did not scale efficiently to multiple domains for NES. Upgrades are expensive in terms of effort.

I give technical support 3/5.

Initial setup was extremely complex due to infrastructure challenges and the specs required to get this implemented.

We implemented it with an in-house team.

It’s a great tool if the developers and ops are separate and the developers do not want to spend a lot of time configuring deployments.

The most valuable features are the automation tools. We use them mainly for automating our application releases across various technologies. The tools have enabled us to reduce the downtime that is required to make any release. The release time has gone down from a number of days to a few minutes. I can get that done easier with this tool.

One of the main benefits is speed. I'm able to reduce the amount of time and resources necessary to do releases. With this solution, I'm able to bring the time down drastically.

I would like to see a more robust solution. There are few downsides which I already expressed to CA. I'm sure they will address them. For example, I would like to see more disaster recovery base solutions and things like that. I've already done that a few times.

The product has evolved a lot. I started my journey with Version 4.7 and now they have come up with Version 6.1. I'm seeing the product becoming more robust. I'm sure CA will make it even more robust in the coming years.

Scalability also got better over time. It was not scalable when we started with it. The product was designed primarily for small and medium scale organizations. I'm now seeing the product scaling up to large scale organizations. I'm sure they will improve this further down the road.

I have used technical support multiples times. They are very informative and helpful.

I was involved in the initial setup. The product is very simple to setup. Because I'm part of the financial industry, the setup was very complex. From the product perspective, it is not very complex to set up. In my case, I needed lot of failovers and things like that, so my implementation was complex.

When selecting a vendor, one of the most important aspects is the size. There are many small players in the industry, but when it comes to solutions, look at the kind of support that those companies can offer. That is a major factor. I would advise others to go with this solution.

For us, Release Automation is a very critical tool that allows us to reproduce, redeliver, and redeploy all our various code in a timely manner and with minimum number of errors. We are very careful about compliance and Release Automation gives us full control of the logs. Basically, we can program all this into CA Release Automation. Then, it can be reproduced in a few hours. This used to take days.

CA Release Automation has been so helpful. Our company is very distributed and once our various groups saw the results of using Release Automation, they started using it and management started seeing the real output.

The main benefit to us is the reduced amount of time spent on migration errors. It also brought us a more efficient way of migrating on command with full automation. And third, most critical to us was that the turnaround time for any particular migration would be predictable. It is much more effective than before.

Release Automation is another baby step towards getting the full environment, fully automated. That is where we are going and Release Automation is a first step in that particular direction. We are making sure that all the steps are in place and automated without human intervention.

Regarding compliance and governance, we need to be sure that certain specific reports are generated for every migration and Release Automation helps us do that. Another issue is what we call job segregation, where, for example, the developer should not have access to the migration to the production. These kinds of things are what we can demonstrate clearly to our compliance team saying that it is possible to do it this way.

Of course, we need to test this more, but I want to see much more seamless integration between Release Automation and CA Service Virtualization or DevTest.

Right now we have to do a lot of intervention, and we would rather automate that particular process also. What happens is that not only are we deploying the product, but we are unit testing it and making sure that even before a user accesses it, we are confident that the deployment went well.

Complete automation is very critical for us, and I rate CA SV 8/10 because it is moving in that direction, but it's not quite there yet.

Scalability is the one aspect we are completely sold on this particular product. All our various teams, at various stages, are going to start using Release Automation and we want to be able to manage all that scale. Also, we are geographically a very diversified company. We want certain hardware in certain areas and less hardware in the other areas. We can do that with the Release Automation.

We have done our research and found the customer service of CA technical support to be excellent. It's really good. They are always there. They treat our cases very seriously, and I'm really happy that we get to interact with them. They make sure that they understand our pains and they understand that when we say there are emergencies, they know that we mean it.

We were involved in the initial setup. We did the integration. We are also integrating this particular product with the other HPE products such as ALM, and so we are having our own challenges with that. We are working through those issues. Once complete automation is well done, it will definitely go to 10/10.

The most valuable features are the ability to shorten our release cycles and to reduce the number of mistakes we make.

It has significantly improved the workload balance of the people that are part of my group. It's also helped us to have less business disruption and these are the primary ways in which it has helped our organization.

It's far more efficient and has helped us to get things done around 70 to 80% faster than before.

There is a continuous delivery version of this product that I believe will solve some of the problems we have; so I'm looking forward to it. Currently we do deployment automation and I want to get to release automation, which is automating everything from start to end. That's what I'm looking for.

There are some technologies that this product doesn't support such as some emerging technologies that we need to build the interfaces for; so if that came as a readymade/off-the-shelf feature, it would help us.

We have been using it for 2 years.

So far, it has been very stable. We have been using it for 2 years and have had no issues. We have experienced some minor issues but nothing major.

We scaled it across our enterprise; we are using it across our entire enterprise.

We started using it for a couple of apps, i.e., somewhere between 40-45 applications; so it is quite good.

We haven’t used CA technical support. We use an account manager for support.

We didn't really use any other solution before. We were using a manual operation which was extremely intensive. Thus, the daily pain involved and the money that we were spending on it were the main reasons for us to lookout for another solution. Money and the time we spent were the biggest variables involved.

For us, it was important as to how quickly we could get started and how much the vendor was willing to invest in us. CA was willing to invest in us as much as we were willing to invest in them; that made the difference.

It was a very straightforward process. It took us a couple of weeks to set it up. I wasn’t involved in the process myself but was told by the technical team that it was easy.

We looked at a whole bunch of other solutions, namely XL Deploy from XebiaLabs.

The reason why we decided to choose CA was because of the completeness of this product, what it came up with and the fact that CA was willing to take a risk with us. They were not getting paid until we were successful in using the product and that made a big difference.

Just get into it and do it. It really makes your life better.

Although the product is good, I'm expecting a lot more from it.

We are still not using this solution for compliance and governance.

Their products are near the market. They cover everything that we need on the customers’ side. Their products also get frequently upgraded, so they keep apace with new technology and new stacks.

Everyone is trying to go into continuous delivery using a continuous integration model. We need to connect all our tools together to see which products are helping us orchestrate all our tools to speed up delivery.

We need to see how they're going to harness Big Data in terms of Java.net, distributed stack, and going into the mainframe.

Whenever we pick a new solution and we try to install it, there are some hiccups in the initial stage. Once that is done, I think the issues are small.

As far as I know, the new products are scalable. I think that all of their products are scalable. CA takes care of scalability. They build their products so they can be scaled up.

Recently I used support for CA Rally, and I think it was really good. We got good support. They were able to resolve our issues and queries.

Originally, there was no solution. Then there was a solution, but it was in small cell buckets. Now the solutions are getting integrated together.

I've been part of certain POCs and the pilot. I think it was straightforward, not complex. But in some scenarios, it is complex. The level of complexity actually depends on which tool we are picking. On average, it is actually moderately complex.

I think everything is good with CA.

The most important criteria in selecting a vendor is whether it is satisfying in terms of your needs. The second factor is the cost.