Nolio Release Automation Reviews

• 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.

We use it for data deployment. Before implementing this tool, we used to do deployment manually and it used to take us close to two months at a time. Once we got this tool, it initially took close to 6 months to create a complete framework and work flow. But once everything was done, everything was set up and could be performed with the click of a button. It now takes around two hours for us to deploy any product. It used to take close to two months, including preparation.

We are saving a lot of manual hours with this tool. That is the most important thing. And it's very flexible. We can implement changes fast with this tool. We learned about this deployment tool from CA. It's really effective in the department in different moments for different applications, be it of Windows or AIX. We can deploy whatever we want with this tool.

The most important thing is the release automation. There are a few things which we already raised at a recent conference, such as the release XML. In order to replace that, we needed to go in the server, delete it, and then recreate the pre-plan. This is time consuming. It should be straightforward from the web application server. There are too many steps, and we already raised this issue in the forum and I don't know whether the RA people are taking care of that or not.

I think the action creation could be much easier. During the process of transition from RA guys to actual CA people, they should have given us some kind of training on that process. There wasn't enough training from CA.

It's stable but there are few updates we need to do because of the new changes. We need to add more actions items, because we were using one tool, and we were deploying the application, so we needed to make sure that that the configuration tool can be used with the help of RA.

It is definitely scalable and it is as big as we need it to be. Because of the actions that we create, we can use them throughout all the applications with the minor changes.

Technical support is good. We still have a few concerns from CA. They have worked with us for a long time, approximately 6-8 months.

It was complex initially. The back end part was the main thing. Creating the action was done completely by CA guys. We just needed to know about the flow and the action. We wanted to learn about the action creation and development at the same time. But we took our time to learn those things.

I would suggest to take the solution and first try to check on how it's helping out the deployment. Just check the trial version, and if it works, then go ahead and get it. It's a pretty good product and it's working for us.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

For us, Release Automation is a very critical tool that allows us to reproduce, redeliver, and redeploy all our various code in a timely manner and with minimum number of errors. We are very careful about compliance and Release Automation gives us full control of the logs. Basically, we can program all this into CA Release Automation. Then, it can be reproduced in a few hours. This used to take days.

CA Release Automation has been so helpful. Our company is very distributed and once our various groups saw the results of using Release Automation, they started using it and management started seeing the real output.

The main benefit to us is the reduced amount of time spent on migration errors. It also brought us a more efficient way of migrating on command with full automation. And third, most critical to us was that the turnaround time for any particular migration would be predictable. It is much more effective than before.

Release Automation is another baby step towards getting the full environment, fully automated. That is where we are going and Release Automation is a first step in that particular direction. We are making sure that all the steps are in place and automated without human intervention.

Regarding compliance and governance, we need to be sure that certain specific reports are generated for every migration and Release Automation helps us do that. Another issue is what we call job segregation, where, for example, the developer should not have access to the migration to the production. These kinds of things are what we can demonstrate clearly to our compliance team saying that it is possible to do it this way.

Of course, we need to test this more, but I want to see much more seamless integration between Release Automation and CA Service Virtualization or DevTest.

Right now we have to do a lot of intervention, and we would rather automate that particular process also. What happens is that not only are we deploying the product, but we are unit testing it and making sure that even before a user accesses it, we are confident that the deployment went well.

Complete automation is very critical for us, and I rate CA SV 8/10 because it is moving in that direction, but it's not quite there yet.

Scalability is the one aspect we are completely sold on this particular product. All our various teams, at various stages, are going to start using Release Automation and we want to be able to manage all that scale. Also, we are geographically a very diversified company. We want certain hardware in certain areas and less hardware in the other areas. We can do that with the Release Automation.

We have done our research and found the customer service of CA technical support to be excellent. It's really good. They are always there. They treat our cases very seriously, and I'm really happy that we get to interact with them. They make sure that they understand our pains and they understand that when we say there are emergencies, they know that we mean it.

We were involved in the initial setup. We did the integration. We are also integrating this particular product with the other HPE products such as ALM, and so we are having our own challenges with that. We are working through those issues. Once complete automation is well done, it will definitely go to 10/10.