Nolio Release Automation Reviews

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.

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.

It's for release automation.

It has improved our speed of deployment.

In terms of its performance, we have struggled a little bit because we have multiple instances around the world without a proper support team behind it. After several years we got the new version, and the upgrade was very painful. We had several issues or defects, but CA was responsive and, in the end, they created a fix-pack which resolved the problems. We managed to upgrade.

It could use better integration with development tools. UCD is better integrated than CA Release Automation.

Another concern with CA Release Automation is that Automic was acquired by CA recently. We're a bit concerned that CA strategy is going with Automic, that CA Release Automation is dead. They are not investing in it too much. For new customers, they're proposing Automic online. They even approached us at the end of last year and asked if we would consider switching to Automic. They do say that in the next two or three years we don't need to worry. They will still provide support for CA Release Automation. But we're not sure how CA Release Automation will evolve.

It's pretty stable.

We have had no scalability issues.

There is not enough support in Central Europe but the central support is okay, it works.

I was not involved in the initial setup of the different instances, directly. We had instances in the US, UK and Singapore. But I was involved in the consolidation or migration program when we migrated CA instances to one central server in a private cloud in Prague, Czech Republic.

It did not go smoothly. There was a lack of knowledge both at CA and within our team as well. We used a consultant who was not so experienced. He wasn't able to help us but when he escalated it on CA's side we got the help we needed. In the end, it was okay but it could have been much smoother.

UrbanCode Deploy, Red Hat Ansible, and we considered Ansible Tower as well. We had some discussions about XebiaLabs XL Deploy, but it was not on the short-list in the end.

When CA is compared to UrbanCode Deploy, the latter is stronger in the development cycle, while CA Release Automation is stronger on the deployment or release automation side.

When selecting a vendor the solution cost and total cost of ownership are definitely two of the criteria; the product quality, usability, scalability, of course, and the support are key as well. The company's market situation is also important. We cannot afford to go into some risky business because it's a long-term investment, especially when it comes to deployment automation.

If I were to consider investing in a new deployment automation tool, I wouldn't switch to CA Release Automation, because of the CA strategy. They don't invest in it anymore. From a strategic perspective, I think it's probably not the best tool to invest in.

I would definitely consider Automic. I think Automic is a leader, and I think from a features perspective, Automic is very comparable with UCD. I think XebiaLabs XL Deploy is becoming much more popular, but it's more for release automation. There are companies around that combine UrbanCode Deploy and XebiaLabs XL Deploy.

I would rate CA Release Automation at seven out of 10. It's a good and mature product but there is no future investment expected in it from CA's side. It's a stable product. It provides the features we need, but I am concerned that, long-term, the technology support might be an issue and a reason I would not give it a 10; that and because of the upgrade challenges we had.

• Ability to maintain the maps of different environments in a single tool. The way the tool organizes and manages the information to be used in the automation deployment is one of its strengths. It is possible to have a map of all the environments involved in the Software Lifecycle (Dev|Pre|Pro), and maintain, in a centralized point, the actions that are shared between the environments and the specific actions of some environments.
• Ability to design and manage DevOps activities from a graphical viewpoint. The core of the tool is the workflow. These workflows are designed in a graphical point of view. This is an excellent functionality which is better than XML or other file based actions definitions. You can perform workflows using other workflows, so this increases the reuse of actions and reduces the copy/paste of actions.
• Ability to manage large installations with more than 5,000 servers due to the 100% scalable architecture. You can install the tool in a simple machine for simple installations or development environments. You can install the solution with redundant servers for critical installations. Also, you can distribute several components of the solution in the way you need in order of manage the deployment of large organizations with a large number of servers, a large number of applications, several technologies, CPDs distributed around the world, mix models including cloud and on premise hardware, etc. You maintain a unique point of access for all of this, sharing actions, dashboards, etc.

There have been improvements in several kinds of projects:

• Projects with more than 5,000 servers and daily deployments.
• Projects in which we must 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 must uninstall the applications and release the cloud infrastructure.
• Deploying applications in a continuous integration environment, including deployment, QA, pre-production, and production environments.

Integration with other technologies such as Dockers. The solution has the capability of integration with other technologies, and I can do this without problems. The issue is that all the tasks are performed and managed in an ad-hoc manner. I think that it will be interesting to increase the standards.

We have used this solution for more than five years.

We encountered a stability issue, but it will be solved with the collaboration of the CA teams.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. It is very important to perform a correct design of the architecture beforehand.

The level of technical support is good.

I use 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 like CA Release Automation.

The initial setup was simple. However, if you want to use the tool in large installations, there are some tricks you should learn.

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

We evaluated open source, XebiaLabs, and IBM.

Begin with a small project and grow it progressively. If you need a large project, you should acquire professional services.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.