Nolio Release Automation Reviews

• Streamlined deployment
• Visual
• Progressive feature list

Deployment workflows has not only increased the confidence in the release process, but also opens up a whole new world to automate the deployment for not just code, but DB, network appliances, application servers, and AWS.

To visually find a particular process, flow or action, the GUI needs to be improved, and also made faster as well.

I've used it for two years.

No issues encountered.

Once in a while, the agent gets into a frenzy, and an agent restart is required.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

8/10.

No previous solution was used.

Installation is straightforward and self-guided.

We implemented it in-house.

Not sure how to qualify it, but the number of releases per week has gone up because it frees up technical resources to carry out more deployments and automate things even further.

Start with a proof-of-concept with a complex application on your end.

• Release Operation Center
• Workflow

You can integrate any tool with CA RA via existing action packs, either customized, or new. The best part is that you can define deployment pipelines and design the processes accordingly, which can be used later in release operation center.

Some of the existing action packs still have bugs which need to be fixed.

For the last two and a half years.

No issues with deployment.

Yes, because of the bugs with the action packs.

No issues unless your are using it in a distributed environment.

8/10.

7/10.

No previous solution used.

It was a very simple setup and easy to learn.

I used in-house product development.

No other options were evaluated.

This product provides a continuous delivery solution and full automation without writing and scripting.

• No scripting
• GUI based
• Roll back feature
• No need of specialized skills for deployment, as the intention is that a tester should be able to do a deployment using CA RA

The benefits achieved for the clients are:

• Reduction in downtime
• Less time to market
• Shorter turn around times in case of failure
• Earlier development
• Ops teams who used to work in silos are now more coordinated

It is being improved regularly, there are new versions of 5.5, 5.6 and so on. Stability is an area for improvement.

I've used it for one and a half years.

No issues so far, the major task is integrating CA RA with existing infrastructure, which takes time.

Yes, every version had some bugs, which are reported back to CA and are accepted and fixed.

Excellent.

Excellent.

I haven't used a different solution.

It's moderately complex.

It was done by an in-house team.

It varies from customer to customer, I don't have figures.

No other options were evaluated.

You need to have good expertise and flexible, and a conducive environment.

The wide range of actions and flexibility in creating the workflows.

Our requirement was to deploy to 300 servers which used to take two to three days before CA RA, now it takes only two to four hours.

The performance.

I've used it for one year and eight months.

The performance degrades as the size of the workflow and the number of target servers increases.

No issues with stability.

We have some issues but we're not really sure of the reason why.

It's good.

It's good.

No previous solution used.

It's easy to setup and maintain afterwards.

It was implemented with the help of a vendor team but I cannot rate them because I wasn't involved with the implementation.

It's the time saved.

We also looked at Visual Build Pro.

It's a good product that has a huge set of actions which can help with deployment.

• The most flexible product to automate deployment process based on the existing infrastructure
• Capacity to rationalize deployment process according to technologies
• Capacity to manage deployment error with the option to start, stop or pause the process
• Dashboard to follow deployment life-cycle
• Capacity to interact with all technologies of information system as change management, load balancing, application server, database etc.

We have automated the deployment of our most important and complex web application. We needed four hours to deploy it with some continuous integration tools and manual procedures.

The development team needed to increase the number of deployments. In 12 days, we have automated this application and increased the deployment from 70 applications to 350 in three months. Additionally, we have automated 250 applications in one year in this tool.

• Release Management
• Cache management for agents

I've used it for three years.

You always discover issues with deployment the first time you use a deployment process. Beginning by deploying on a development environment, the risk is reduced. We never met bugs with the tools during a deployment.

Never had any stability issues.

Never, if the action type doesn’t exist you can create it by yourself.

8/10. Support can be better but year to year it gets better. You can also contact developers using the community or during user-groups in London to share your ideas and new features you want to see in new releases.

7/10 because they can be more efficient to solve issues, and you always have to prove that the issues don’t come from your infrastructure but from the product.

I switched from CA Release Automation (Nolio) to Serena Release Automation one time because Nolio was a partner of Serena. When Nolio was bought by CA Technologies, the partnership was broken so Serena advised the client to migrate to a new tool (UrbanCode).

You need an expert to initialize the project. Initial setup of the product is simple as you follow a methodology. This is true for all products.

We used a Vendor Team from CA and in England or France they have a good level of knowledge. Also, an expert such as myself is also a good solution.

Confidential but not much compared to the large perimeter we had to automate.

Methodology to model the deployment process and the communication between development and operation are the most important.

You also have to define your requirements in order to choose the best product, if you can’t CA Release Automation is the most flexible product to adapt itself to your organization.

Visual Design. I've worked with shell scripts in bash all my life, so when I need to do control statements or flows, this used to be a nightmare, but with LISA RA it is easier for me to create flows and control statements, and detect errors.

Before LISA RA implementation, the developers request for a restart would, for instance, take two to three days. With LISA RA, we developed a process where the restart is done within 10-15 minutes, and this process is used 15-20 times a day, from Monday to Friday. This is just one process, we have another process for DB and storage.

Maybe user management, and more hardware architecture, like a mainframe.

I have used it for two years.

Yes, but we found a way to solve them.

No we didn't have any stability issues, everything is OK.

No issues encountered.

9/10.

9/10.

This tool is complex, I recommend people design and develop a process with LISA RA who have expertise with shell scripting, and related tools such as SED, AWK, Perl, command line Unix or Linux definitely and maybe Java or POO basis.

If the enterprise has all standard software installations, the implementation and development not take more than two to three months. In another case, if the enterprise software installations are not standard, it could take one to two years because the enterprise has to fix all software installations prior to doing a standard software install.

Initial setup cost is more expensive, but the day-to-day cost is only for maintenance, design and for people development.

We didn't evaluate any other products.

Setup standard installations for all Operating Systems instances. In the long run this practice will gain time for the implementation process.

• Process Design
• Logic Design

One example would be that we don't need to worry about whether the user who is using it has expertise in certain technologies like Shell Scripting or PowerShell etc. If the end user has basic knowledge of process execution in the product, he can easily deploy without actually knowing what is happening in the background.

We are using an old version and a new version is now on the market. As the latest version has lots of new features, I am not certain what improvements are required until we use it.

I've used it for about three and a half years.

Regarding the deployment we haven't has any issues. However, with Release Deployments we have had issues because the release had some issues with packaging/code issues or the release package structure has changed.

Yes, we have had some issue because we migrated a product database from a normal Oracle environment to an Oracle RAC cluster environment. This has affected the performance for some time.

None so far.

Over the years customer service has improved, and I am happy with the current service. It's really good.

It's good, no problems so far. One of the good things is that I don't have to explain a lot if I raise a case with the Tech Support team and their responses are also quick (surely it is based on case priority).

I am not 100% certain because I wasn't involved in the beginning. I think as I mentioned earlier, we were using Shell Scripting for deployment and we needed a level of expertise in scripting to understand those scripts and make changes in it. The other reason was that the support team can focus on operational support rather than live deployments.

It was complex in the beginning, and now its quite straightforward.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but I am sure we had a recommendation for the vendor and they were in-house for the initial setup. I did meet the expert team at a conference for user groups, and they were very good.

Yes, we evaluated other products as well, but I am not sure what the other options were.

Go for a higher version and you should probably take the training before using it. Please note that in the latest version of CA Release Automation, almost all the Automation Studio features are going to be browser based, so all the process designing can be performed using browser based systems.

The UI makes it easier for non-engineers to understand. It's reliable and works well once you figure out its quirks.

We have used the product to automate software deployments and simple tasks for technical support. We have reduced our failure rate dramatically due to automation. However, that's more due to the fact that we've automated than any particular virtue of the product.

The UI is very quirky, with numerous small frustrating bugs. While it is possible to script, the REST API is nearly impossible to use and the old CLI support has many undocumented features.

I've used it for three years.

The deployment process is painful. We avoid it as much as possible.

We've had a few outages due to bugs. We were able to work around the bugs, but it was a frustrating process.

Yes. The licensing model before the company was purchased was scalability-friendly. Now it is not.

About a 3/10. It took weeks to get a simple quote for more licenses (we joked that CA doesn't want our money) and their support portal is very difficult to use.

About a 5/10. I'm not sure CA has more than one or two people who even know what the product is, much less the details of how it works.

We had no previous solution.

We bought the product before CA purchased it.

We received a lot of support from the pre-CA company. They were excellent.

It's high in that we have moved a lot closer to continuous delivery. It's reliable. However, the licensing model will eventually force us to find another solution.

I don't know the original setup cost. They charge several thousand per agent/node.