Nolio Release Automation Reviews

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.

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.

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 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.

CA Release Automation has a GUI which is easy to use and develop the solutions.
Most of the day-to-day tasks which need automation have been already covered by built-in actions. So you just have to drag and drop to start using it.

It has various plugins, which make integration with other tools like ServiceNow, Jenkins, and JIRA, etc. easy and helps in implementing CI and CD, following an agile approach.

The ROC provides features that help in release management and ServiceNow authentication when enabled, and can make production deployments safe and error free.

Deployments have been automated fully and now all the teams follow a single, error-free approach of deployment, which is time saving and seldom faults. It helps to implement standardization.

I would suggest that, rather than just concentrating on release automation and management, this tool could provide for more automation in different areas, such as database automation (we already have this but still can be improved further).

I have used CA Release Automation for over three years.

No particular issue from CA Release Automation side. if we had any deployment failures it was mostly due to the environment.

The tool is very stable and any issues we have encountered have been due to infrastructure-related issues (servers/VMs) or human error.

We have not faced any issues which scalability till now, but we do not have implementations which are very large.

CA technical support is good. You also have a community where the experts will help you with issues.

I had used IBM RAF for deployments. It does not have the same flexibility as CA Release Automation for automation in it.

Initial setup is pretty straightforward and we did not face any issues.

We had previous knowledge about this tool, so selection was not difficult.

I would definitely recommend it to whosoever wants a good solution for their automation, deployment and release management.

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.

• 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.

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.