Nolio Release Automation Reviews

A valuable feature of this product is faster delivery time. Initially, we had 4 days for deployment which has now changed to only a few minutes for core deployment. For database schema changes, we are performing automated deployment.

Previously, we were hiring external contractors who were responsible for deployment. Now, we have removed them from the equation and instead we are using this tool. This has benefited us, not just in terms of costs for paying the external vendors but also enables faster delivery time, that has been reduced from days to a couple of hours.

We would like mainframe automation deployment. It is one of the biggest components in our organization. For distributed applications, we obviously need to have more on the mainframe, as well, so that we can have 100% accomplishment. So, we would like to see mainframe automation.

It is good and is doing what it is supposed to do. I don't see any challenges. After observing the success rate for deployment, we are getting more participation from different applications; so, it is doing good as expected.

We have experienced no scalability issues. The agents are always up and running, so no complaints.

For any product enhancements or any challenges/issues experienced, we have used the technical support. It is good and responsive.

We were not using any other product prior to this one. We were carrying out the entire process manually.

I was not involved in the setup process but we were involved in product evaluation.

This is one of the best tools that we have. It is helping us to meet our automation goals and to reach 100% DevOps enablement. I would suggest to all those interested to first evaluate this tool and then go for it.

Mainframe automation is one of the biggest challenges for us and currently the product doesn’t address it. We hire external contractors that carry out the deployment process and the cost for each deployment works out to around $400. Automating this process can save us huge amounts of money and time.

This product is one of the key pillars for us. The three main vertical stacks involved are building, testing and deployment. This tool addresses release automation completely, which is one of the key components in DevOps. Deployment of mainframe components delivery is an outstanding feature. I wouldn’t say that it is giving a 360-degree view but it is working good in terms of distributed applications.

The compliance and governance process is completely isolated from deployment. Currently, we still use the service for Change Management and Release Management processes. This will continue but we are not integrating with release automation; it will be isolated.

We were using an in-house developed release tool, but we wanted to achieve better orchestration in our workflow. We wanted to be able to release more frequently and have greater visibility for our team. CA Release Automation gave us the flexibility to deploy multiple components in multiple environments. We do data warehousing so we have Java and WebLogic components, as well as web services, and everything can be deployed with a single tool. I really value that. As one who designed our release workflow, with the help of my team, I think that CA Release Automation is a very, very good product. We can now deploy whenever we want. We have more visibility with more logins. Our users are very happy too.

Right now, our developers are very, very excited to use it. We can release multiple code features at one time. That is the biggest benefit. In large projects, there are often code dependencies between applications. Now, we have set up a list of dependencies, with the help of expert's at CA technical support. If we have for example, one application that is dependent on two more applications, we can deploy all three together. None of the applications will be down. They are always current with the latest features. That's what I love about it.

As of now, we are looking into continuous development. This will be taken into consideration as management makes the final decision. We are evaluating quite a few options. We are going to implement that very soon.

We also have implemented rules for compliance and governance. We have created multiple environments and every user group has access to the different environments. We restrict users from accessing higher environments without approval.

I know that continuous delivery's already coming, but I still need to see how it will work out. What I personally want to see is more features for data warehousing deployment. Right now, I prefer Informatica. We want an action pack to deploy completely on Informatica. All actions for DB2 and its SQL servers are implemented and almost all the actions for WebLogic. I would love to see something coming out for Informatica.

I believe it's pretty stable. Of course, there are chances of improvement in any tool or any application. But CA Release Automation is a pretty stable application where one core piece can communicate to multiple sources and targets, which I love personally.

It can be scaled up to more than 2,000 action items. We are using about 400 actions as of now. However, due to the complex flow we use for internal company needs, we are actually doing more than a thousand.

Technical support is very good. They have always been available.

We were using an in-house developed release tool, but wanted better orchestration for our releases.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did encounter a few issues, such infrastructure configuration, but I didn't think there was any major problems.

First, when you adapt your solution of Release Automation, you need to know what you actually want. What do you need, why you are doing what you're doing? Second, if the product satisfies your needs today, you need to look five years into the future. For the next five years, what are you going to achieve; then make the decision. I think Release Automation would help a lot.

We use it for data deployment. Before implementing this tool, we used to do deployment manually and it used to take us close to two months at a time. Once we got this tool, it initially took close to 6 months to create a complete framework and work flow. But once everything was done, everything was set up and could be performed with the click of a button. It now takes around two hours for us to deploy any product. It used to take close to two months, including preparation.

We are saving a lot of manual hours with this tool. That is the most important thing. And it's very flexible. We can implement changes fast with this tool. We learned about this deployment tool from CA. It's really effective in the department in different moments for different applications, be it of Windows or AIX. We can deploy whatever we want with this tool.

The most important thing is the release automation. There are a few things which we already raised at a recent conference, such as the release XML. In order to replace that, we needed to go in the server, delete it, and then recreate the pre-plan. This is time consuming. It should be straightforward from the web application server. There are too many steps, and we already raised this issue in the forum and I don't know whether the RA people are taking care of that or not.

I think the action creation could be much easier. During the process of transition from RA guys to actual CA people, they should have given us some kind of training on that process. There wasn't enough training from CA.

It's stable but there are few updates we need to do because of the new changes. We need to add more actions items, because we were using one tool, and we were deploying the application, so we needed to make sure that that the configuration tool can be used with the help of RA.

It is definitely scalable and it is as big as we need it to be. Because of the actions that we create, we can use them throughout all the applications with the minor changes.

Technical support is good. We still have a few concerns from CA. They have worked with us for a long time, approximately 6-8 months.

It was complex initially. The back end part was the main thing. Creating the action was done completely by CA guys. We just needed to know about the flow and the action. We wanted to learn about the action creation and development at the same time. But we took our time to learn those things.

I would suggest to take the solution and first try to check on how it's helping out the deployment. Just check the trial version, and if it works, then go ahead and get it. It's a pretty good product and it's working for us.

The process design tools included are easy to use and very good at deploying applications across various platforms and operating systems.

Applications that have been on boarded into the Release Automation application have shown a decrease in deployment time and down time for maintenance.

The system seems unstable as we are constantly having to re-connect execution servers and agents that go offline. In addition, the upgrade process has been painful in our experience and we usually run into issues requiring support assistance.

Personally, I have been using this product for just over two years. As a company, we have been using this product for about 3 and a half years.

If an agent or execution server is offline then the deployment will not start as the product cannot reach the servers that it needs to deploy to.

Yes, stability is a persistent issue for us. We spend an average of 1 - 2 hours a week troubleshooting offline agents. I am told that a lot of these issues have been addressed in the 6.2 version that is now available and we are in the process of upgrading.

The product seems to be incredibly stable. We currently fluctuate between 50 and 100 agents in our environment with no issue. I understand that there are companies utilizing 1000 - to 1500 agents. The architecture is easily scaled to accommodate high quantities of agents spanning multiple physical locations.

Excellent. CA is always quick to respond and has a workaround to get us up and going in a reasonable amount of time. They have taken the time to understand our issues and what our visions are.

Fair. Determining a root cause for an issue or receiving any sort of permanent solution involving a code level change can span weeks or even months because technical resources seem limited on CA's side.

CA's reps have been extremely helpful in my experience. They take the time to understand what you are trying to do and then propose solutions and pricing with room for scaling based on resources and budget constraints. This product is licensed based on the number of agents (servers) in the environment so that is a consideration each time we on board a new product into the Release Automation application.

If the stability issues are truly addressed in the latest version of the product then I would absolutely recommend this product to anyone looking for a good way to standardize and report on deployments for various applications spanning multiple platforms and physical locations.

The best thing that it offers us is the opportunity to streamline our deployment so that we can have serial and horizontal dependencies. We have been able to stack multiple different server type deployments along the database deployments, have them all dependent on each other appropriately and report out the successes or problems at the end of the process.

We have the repeatability, we have the confidence that it's doing the same thing each time the way we've set it up to do and just being able to have the expectation of knowing exactly what's going to happen in the order that our infrastructure needs it to happen.

We rely on it quite often. We use it many, many times during the course of a week or a month and it's held up for us, so it's doing what we need it to do.

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing different kinds of scheduling options and being able to troubleshoot more real time if something does go wrong. Those would be two things that would be very helpful to us.

Deployment was pretty big and there were a lot of dependencies between the different components and we just weren't able to make it work manually.

Scalability, we have added in more and more. We don't have the largest implementation by any means but we've got a very complex system and we add more to it on a regular basis as our application grows.

It goes back quite a few years that we've been using this and at the time we were either going to do a homegrown solution or this. Those were the two options.

One, it's agent-based. It allows us to do multiple things at once as opposed to serially, which we had a home grown tool that did it serially. We've reduced our time frames. I think the pre-codified actions for doing the release activities, also is a major benefit. It's something that we don't have to write scripts for, they're already written. We just need to pull them together. Those are the two major things.

The other thing that the tool does that we're beginning to realize is it's addressing what Gartner's calling this bi-modal approach. What we're realizing is that Mode 1, which is your old legacy type of approach, which is why we got the tool. It's fantastic for, but now the new fast speeds using it in the Mode 2 type thing, we're finding it bullet-proof there as well.

One of the key benefits, what really we're looking at is the quality of the releases, not necessarily the code quality, but the actual deployments and the speed at which we're doing it. Things that we automate are taking upwards of 8 to 10 times less. Now, what we can do is we can do 3 to 4 times more on a release. We just had our largest release ever. Without CA Release Automation, there's no way we could deliver that level of code to our end-customers. It's very stable.

We're using it more on the deployment side. What we really want to do is see a stronger or easier user interface. I think the biggest complaint that we've gotten from the development side is that the user interface, the experience is not as good as they'd like it to be. It's hard to comprehend. We've overcome that with a lot of our own solutions, but we'd really like to see that user interface, and would like to see them get into more of the release orchestration aspect. We're actually using an internal solution for that. I know they're heading in that direction, we're really looking for that, and again, that needs to be ease of use. That user experience is critical. The developers have their critical time frames, and for them to figure out and comprehend a new tool is not acceptable. We need it to be simplistic and easy to use. There are some challenges, we've overcome a lot of them though.

Very stable. We were fortunate that early on, one of our internal technicians/architects sat down with CA. Went through the process of designing what the solution should look like. We're benefiting from that up front set up and structure of the tool in order to make it very reliable. It's enterprise wide, it's being used by all groups.

Extremely scalable, that's one of the main reasons why we bought it. It's extremely scalable. We've been able to scale up from probably 100 or so automations to where we're doing 700 now, per release. It's been a very powerful tool. Broad set of technologies as well.

The tool has been so bullet-proof, we haven't had to tap it, but when we have tapped it, it's been spot on.

Our releases were getting bigger and bigger. The demand was getting larger and larger. We knew that the home grown tool was not going to be able to be scalable, basically. It was elongating our releases. We need to get our stuff done in a weekend, and it was beginning to drift into the following week. We went to the marketplace, CA Release Automation was a market leader, we made a quick decision in that direction. We haven't regretted it.

The support we've had with CA in the past had been very strong, those were important to us. Then, the depth of the solution. I think we're looking into the depth of the solution, and the agility and flexibility of that solution, I think were important to us in this decision. We're with a large player, somebody that could support us if we needed. The tool, from everything we had been reading and researching, it could stand up to it. I think those were the things that we were looking for.

The initial set up itself as relatively straightforward, what was a challenge was the roll out. You had competing priorities, you had adoption issues, you had skill set gaps. Not only on the roll out team, but on our development team. What we were able to do was close some of those skill set gaps. It became a journey where we had to show the value to each of the individual development groups, and it created momentum. As we got these development groups onto the CA release automation, they saw the benefit. We were able to take internal environments, and be able to turnaround those environments in seconds as opposed to days. We began to get the adoption. It's getting that initial movement forward which was really the challenge. I don't know that there's anything that CA could've done. It was something that we had to do internally.

At the time we did the selection, no. They were out there. I was not part of the selection process, I know the person that was, and we got release automation before it was known as CA Release Automation. It was then purchased by CA. It was a clear market leader, so we basically went in that direction.

My recommendation would be: a) buy the tool, b) recognize that it's a journey. It's not something that it's a binary thing that's going to happen overnight. You've got to continually sell it and treat it as an ongoing initiative. We're post the projectization of it, and we're still bringing people on board to the process. I would recognize that this is a continuous delivery, if you will, exercise that I don't think ever stops because your code and your code base is constantly evolving. There are things that you can continually do, integrate it with your change management environments, integrate it with some of the other DevOps tools that you can't even imagine what you can do with it. I would say, recognize that it is a great foundation for your release automation, but it doesn't stop there. This tool is holding up to the new requirements that are coming, and that's what we really like about the tool is as the world evolves, this tool is stable. It's stable and it's able to adapt.

One of the major value we assigned the tool is it's a agent-based deployment tool. Our job is pushing code through all, consistently, 24/7 so we want the tool to handle our deployment volume.

The benefits: we are able to deliver more. Our release volume doubled up but our release window went down by 80% so we deliver more and faster.

The release orchestration and release automation tool. The automation tool is a very good deployment engine but it's not fitting our release orchestration process so we have to go for another tool to handle the orchestration, integrate the tool with the release automation. I'm looking for more features in the release orchestration.

The product is very stable. We had minor performance issues but we contacted CS Support. They gave us a solution to fix the issue.

Scalability is a good question. We started with one application automation. Now, we automate around 400 applications. We installed close to 2,000 agents.

The level 1 support is awesome, okay. Whenever we open a ticket with CS Support, we got a email response, a phone call, within 2 to 4 hours. If level 1 is not able to address the issue, they escalate to level 2 and level 3 and we get the solution very quickly.

We bought two solutions together. One is Release Automation, because our release planning team had a very strong gating process. We have to go through a approval process. They have a very strict change management process. The release automation tool did not fit really well into the process, that's why we need to go for another solution.

Our application portfolio is growing and our release window is doubled but our customers start complaining, okay when you do release software, we have to take our production system down. We want a tool to move core faster so we can bring down our release window and take a very brief outage in the production.

The reason I'd rate it 8/10 is because it is a very strong, stable deployment engine. It's very scalable. It fits really well with our deployment process.

Recommendations: first look at their current processes. How they do the release, how they do the deployments. Look for all the tools. What tool will fit into their process? When you buy new tools, you want to make sure it fits very well to the process.

The measurement we take is only two factors. The number of changes going into production and how long it takes. We are able to deliver more. We doubled our release volume but stayed within the same release window. We are able quickly, on board application for automation. Previously, it used to take weeks and months to automate an application because they're all skill based application. Repeatable and reusable process in the tool, we build a deployment process. We just onboard an application to the automation.

• Continuous Integration is easy to automate.
• It can be integrated and used for handling releases for many different platforms and tools such as .Net, Java based Application Servers, load balancers, and many others using Standard Action Packs.
• It's easy to build flows using Standard Action Packs without writing any scripts.
• It includes plug-ins to integrate with different ITSM and Source Control tools to automate deployments with REST API.

• We've integrated it with our ticketing system to automatically trigger deployments and update tickets accordingly, saving a lot of manual effort.
• Our number of successful deployments have also increased exponentially.

• Error message descriptions need to be more accurate and specific.
• Error handling needs to be improved in some of the action packs. 
• UI is a little complicated to understand for the new user and needs some improvements.