Nolio Release Automation Reviews

Their products are near the market. They cover everything that we need on the customers’ side. Their products also get frequently upgraded, so they keep apace with new technology and new stacks.

Everyone is trying to go into continuous delivery using a continuous integration model. We need to connect all our tools together to see which products are helping us orchestrate all our tools to speed up delivery.

We need to see how they're going to harness Big Data in terms of Java.net, distributed stack, and going into the mainframe.

Whenever we pick a new solution and we try to install it, there are some hiccups in the initial stage. Once that is done, I think the issues are small.

As far as I know, the new products are scalable. I think that all of their products are scalable. CA takes care of scalability. They build their products so they can be scaled up.

Recently I used support for CA Rally, and I think it was really good. We got good support. They were able to resolve our issues and queries.

Originally, there was no solution. Then there was a solution, but it was in small cell buckets. Now the solutions are getting integrated together.

I've been part of certain POCs and the pilot. I think it was straightforward, not complex. But in some scenarios, it is complex. The level of complexity actually depends on which tool we are picking. On average, it is actually moderately complex.

I think everything is good with CA.

The most important criteria in selecting a vendor is whether it is satisfying in terms of your needs. The second factor is the cost.

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.

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.

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.

1. Manifest driven
2. Multi-tier release automation
3. Comprehensive set of action packs and plug-ins to achieve business requirements

1. The number of errors have been reduced
2. A higher quality process has been achieved for application releases
3. Release Automation's significance and capability led to the formation of a new vertical team called DevOps in my organization
4. DevOps is being implemented on all the projects in my organization, to enhance customer experience

Zero down time during production deployment. Currently we use the 'Bank' concept for scalability.

I've used it for four years.

Yes, but that was later fixed by the CA team in the later versions of the product.

If more than 150 nodes are connected to the execution/NAC server, then we observe slowness in the execution of the processes. This then leads to time-outs, and the deployment fails on some of the nodes.

No issues encountered.

7/10.

7/10.

We used to do the deployment manually, which lasted for hours, and it didn't usually work in one go. So to automate the deployments we started using Release Automation.

With the help of a CA team, the initial setup was simple.

We implemented it through a CA team.

We also looked at IBM u Deploy.

It is a very good product and can help the organizations in the long run, which will lead to higher customer satisfaction.

• Zero-code deployment process design: With this feature, it's easy to share, discuss, and debug the deployment logic with non-technical people.
• Easy to orchestrate activities across multiple servers.
• Easy to synchronize the changes so they happen at the right time in relation to each other and even to pass information between those servers.
• Has a vast library of standard actions and action packs that cover 99% of use cases of the customers.
• Has REST APIs and plugins to integrate with external systems such as Jenkins, ServiceNow, Puppet, and Chef.
• Has a manifest-driven deployment and artifact package to easily reuse the same artifacts.
• Reuses the flow logic in multiple applications for deployment on different environments and shared components.

With CA Release Automation, the customers whom I worked with were able to:

• Increase the number of deployments
• Increase the deployment speed
• Increase the number of concurrent deployments
• Lower the error rate
• Improve the visibility and the reliability of the deployment process

I would like to see:

• Improving the shared component features
• Porting the versioning feature of the shared components to the classic components

We have used this solution for about two years.

The product was very stable and reliable. This was also the case in big installations with a lot of agents involved, thanks to the high availability architecture.

There were no scalability issues. It was designed with scalability in mind. It's easy to manage a big number of agents by adding a new execution server to the architecture.

The technical support is very good. They are always responsive and helpful, and try to resolve the issues promptly.

The initial setup is almost straightforward. The important thing is correctly sizing the architecture based on the number of agents to deploy.

I recommend trying to build the continuous delivery pipeline, step-by-step. You can do this by integrating the external software solutions for building and testing, such as Jenkins Automation Testing.

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.

The dashboard is the most valuable feature as it allows you to monitor all agents installed on all app servers.

We did a pilot - a POC – during which were able to make some progress with the product; it was a previous client, and they were trying to use this product but we couldn’t get it to work properly in the development environment.

It could use more plug-ins – at least in v2. Mostly it would have been nice to see it integrated with Jenkins and JIRA to create the tickets, and to be a plug-in for Quality Center.

I've used it for six months.

We wanted to set up the automation continuous integration build process, and then we wanted to create a failure mode so it would automatically create a ticket in some defect management system. We couldn’t get the support, and we weren’t able to achieve our goals, and there were no other plug-ins available for JIRA or Jenkins.

It was in the development environment, but we didn't see anything.

We didn’t use it.

We couldn’t reach out to support because the product didn’t have the appropriate plug-ins.

We used a home-grown product on the IBM side. We wanted to enable faster continuous integration dev-ops methodology.

The initial setup was easy and straightforward.

It was a combination of our team and CA engineers.

It was expensive. In the latest version they have a lot of plug-ins so it would be worth it to invest in that version rather than what we used.

We didn't evaluate other options.

I would suggest v3.0 with all the plug-ins, which provides a lot more depth in using the product. There’s also a lot of technical support, customer service, and other online support options with that release.