Nolio Release Automation Reviews

Most importantly, it provides an agile solution that is based on DevOps concepts. This is very good for DevOps teams, and I can say that it is a very helpful feature. Some other features which are used by our organization, includes the migration of process design for the Release Operations Center (ROC), the ability to share components across an enterprise, and integration with Chef Tool.

We were facing a problem to release our code at the decided time. The development team were busy writing the code and then they prepared the build. After this process, the testing team started testing the build. So the whole process was taking a lot of time, then we heard about this tool.

It’s an enterprise-class continuous delivery solution that takes release automation to the next level, providing an agile and collaborative application delivery chain. Now, the situation is that the Release Automation tool tests released script. The Development team spend so much time in developing code and, at the same time, the testing team can test the build. As a result, Release Automation has been able to save us time

It does not support integration with Jenkins for .Net

We have been using CA Release Automation since last year.

A little bit, but after troubleshooting it was solved.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

8/10.

No solution in place, and we were doing everything manually.

It was a little complex.

We used a vendor team who were 9/10.

It's 8/10.

No other options were evaluated.

In general, we are replacing vendors with virtual services because vendors are not available and it is costly to get support from them. This is the primary use case for the solution.

The CA Application Insight feature is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The configuration of the solution is a bit difficult to maneuver. They should work to make it easier.

I'm not sure if there are any features missing from the solution.

I've been using the solution for five years.

The solution is quite stable. We haven't faced any bugs or glitches or noticed anything at all that has affected its performance.

The scalability of the solution is very good. We haven't had any trouble when expanding the solution.

Right now, we have 15 users on it. Most are engineers or admins. They're handling the day to day department tasks.

We've been in touch with technical support in the past. They are pretty good. They work to get back to us as soon as possible. We've been satisfied with how they've assisted us so far.

We didn't previously use a different tool.

The solution's initial setup is quite complex. It's not straightforward.

Deployment took about two to three months for us.

The number of people you will need for your deployment depends on the project. In our case, we only needed two people to take care of it.

We handled the implementation ourselves. We didn't need the assistance of outside vendors or integrators.

I'm not sure of the licensing costs for this solution. These are not details I handle in my day to day. They are directly handled by the client.

I've also looked at HP and Micros Focus as options that we may work with them in the future.

This solution is a great tool. In my opinion, it's the number one tool on the market right now, and I've done some research into other options. 

I'd recommend this solution to others. Many people don't realize that things can be virtualized like this. It can be very easy. All the requirements are right there in one click. It's simple to use. People should try it.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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.

The built-in action packs for different systems is the most valuable feature. The CA RA install comes with built-in plugins for tools such as TIBCO, WebSphere, IIS and so on. This helps to avoid writing custom scripts to deploy to those kinds of servers. We use those plugins instead.

It helped with auto-deployment of the pipeline from TeamCity & configuring rollbacks, and seeing versions and release pipeline status.

Have an agentless deployment: Right now, we had to install agents on all deployment servers, for it to work with the CA RA tool. Currently, when a deployment server needs to connect with the CA RA tool, it needs an agent installed on it. So, when we deploy to 100 machines, we need to install 100 CA agents on each one of them, i.e., even in the production servers.

I also think that the cost of this product is high. There are other cheaper deployment solutions available in the market.

I have used this solution for more than six months.

We did have some stability issues. Sometimes, my agents on the deployment servers failed to connect with the CA RA server. So, I had to restart the agents on deployment servers once a week in order to make them active again on the CA RA admin console.

Technical support is good. The support was quite responsive.

We were trying out many different solutions and CA RA was one of them.

For the setup, the complexity level was medium.

The price of this product is expensive.

We are still in the evaluation mode with different vendors. Also, some teams are using the CA RA tool extensively.

Do a PoC of the product and weigh the cons and benefits, before buying the actual licenses.

Some of the most valuable features of CA Release Automation are definitely the shared components, as well as the tokens. Shared components within this application are repeatable processes that you can assign throughout multiple applications, such as your business types, funding, credit, whatever else, that are repeatable processes. For example, if you wanted to set up an IS site or something along those lines, you would create a repeatable flow process with the application, and then you can leverage token values to fill in something like the service account, the passwords, that kind of stuff, that would actually be populated as part of your IS site deployment. It's pretty cool and a pretty awesome feature that we leverage all the time.

In our pipeline, right now, it's used as the release. We use Jenkins to build our applications and then it sends over to Release Automation. It's basically changed the way that we're doing our deployments. We now have, instead of three-hour deployments, they're three minutes. As well as, it creates more consistencies in the environments and helps it determine if the issue is with the server, the code, whatever else, when you're actually deploying out. It's been extremely helpful.

Some of the things that we're using for compliance and governance is basically the auditing that we can use with the application, like, who deployed it, when it was deployed, what versions were deployed from dev, QA, train, stage, production. It's been pretty helpful on that one.

Some features that it's currently missing are the components that CA has put into their Continuous Delivery Edition product. That product should probably be combined with this product, instead of being a separate product. I would say that that's one of the issues that I currently see with it. I know that they put it in there as separate products but long term, it should really be combined.

We've been using CA Release Automation for about a little over a year now.

The solution itself is pretty stable, as long as you're integrating it with enterprise solutions, as well, using an enterprise database, because it's a pretty database-intense product. Don't try to use some sort of MySQL. Use something that's real, as well as the repository for your artifacts, using an enterprise Nexus or enterprise Artifactory, instead of just the built-in products.

It's pretty scalable, because you could just have multiple execution servers run. If you wanted to have more servers and agents deployed out than you currently have execution servers, you can add those on at any given time.

So far, the technical support that we've had is pretty good. I usually get about an hour response time, especially if it's something that's escalated. The other week, after I submitted a request I got a response in about 10 minutes. They opened a WebEx within an hour, and we were discussing the issue. It was surprisingly well, compared to other technical groups that I've worked with before.

We decided to invest in CA Release Automation because we were trying to find ways to be more efficient in our code delivery. We had a lot of outages surrounding releases going wrong, and part of that is also code not being built automated; versions not being the same from QA to production; just a lot of those little things that built up over time.

We also expanded as a company, so we finally have started looking at everything that we can fix and this is one of the places that we started with.

When we work with vendors, I would say just being able to actually be listened to is something we look for; whenever we have issues, actually getting responses from the companies. I find that CA actually will respond. They might not have everything out of the box that we want, but they'll listen, and they'll actually update their code and add more plug-ins. One thing that they have actually updated; we requested TIBCO version 6 for BW deployments to be added as a plugin, and they're in the process of actually adding that to their new release, on the roadmap.

The initial setup can be open to more of the interpretation of the user. If you want to have it set up baseline, you just want to deploy out one or two types of products, that's pretty quick. It wouldn't take too much time. If you're trying to create it as a central enterprise solution for your company, then that's going to take a while. It took us about six months or so, maybe closer to eight, to actually get our real foundation set before we can quickly onboard and really automate adding artifacts to CA Release Automation.

To be fair, I think that there are a lot of things that it is capable of: deploying out; integrating with other products. The UI and the design can sometimes be a little flaky, and that is a little frustrating at different points, but overall, it's definitely a solution, if you're looking for an enterprise product to do your releases for multiple types of deployments.

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.

We are currently going through a period of trying to implement CICD, Continuous Integration and Delivery. We've quite a lot of tools in the CI space. Now we want to expand that out to try and allow for automated deployments, so that we can get a more integrated process and workflow, between actually building and creating code, and the actually deploying that into the systems. So that's really what our main focus is of implementing RA. 

The most valuable features for us all revolve around the automated deployments, so it's more around the governance and consistency across all the different technologies that we have. We're just in the process of implementing Release Automation, so I think once we've implemented it, and started to get to grips with the initial functionality that's available, we can start to look a little bit deeper, and see what other functionalities are useful.

We have a lot of CA products within the company and they've all fit our requirements, and I don't see any difference with Release Automation. Its benefits to us are of pulling our project together and making us more efficient. It also allows us to have a repeatable process that enables governance and control.

As we're just in the initial implementation phase, I can't say there's any room for improvement, save for maybe the complexity of it because of all the functionalities. I can see why it was chosen from the POC. Once we've got the initial implementation over and done with, we can then start to look at more of what the tool has to offer.

We haven't actually got as far as configuring the Production Instance. We've only dabbled in the POC. So it's hard to tell at this time.

In terms of actually implementing the tool technically, it's straightforward. The challenge that we've got within our company at the moment is that we're in the process of trying to roll out a cloud. It's trying to understand how Release Automation fits with that because I think it's getting very on-premise focused until now. And that's one of the challenges that we've got.

We ran a POC earlier this year. It basically looked at IBM UrbanCode versus CA Release Automation. They're the two market leaders.

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.