Nolio Release Automation Reviews

• 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.

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.

Usability – it’s good for developers who are both technical and non-technical. This has been particularly helpful for us.

Helps with a faster ramp-up time. This is the best way in which it has helped us for sure. Otherwise, it's got the standard features for an automation tool.

• More stability and customizations
• Better integration with new open source tools
• Even more stability for the new version

We use two versions – the older version (4.4) is very unstable, while the newer one (5.5) is much better. So we went from many issues to far less.

We are not able to scale it beyond what was initially defined on the infra-bases, so I can't fully answer.

They're helpful for lots of things. Never had issues with them.

We had always used an in-house tool.

It was already setup when I joined.

We also looked at Atlassian, but CA has been there for a long time and we've just kept with them, especially since they integrate with everything and other CA tools. We also look at the integration focus of new tools.

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.

• 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.

I like the shared components and version control.

Shared components:

In my work, we have about 30 Java standalone applications, although every application is different and has specific behaviors. Nonetheless, I realized that all of them can be installed in the same way. I had to design only one flow for all of them. I found that the "Shared components" feature helps me.

I had to create my common flow like a "shared component". For every application, I only had to "import" that shared component. Another amazing thing was that if I had to change something in my shared component, I could easily reflect my changes to all of the applications.

Version Control:

The version control is important because the changes that I make in my shared component can be controlled. I can decide which version will work with which Java application.

Now we have automatic installations and it is very easy to promote the installation between environments.

I would like to see a better way to re-use a task. If you are not aware of how to use and re-use the task, you can mix their content or lose data.

When you are creating a new flow, you should reuse a previously created task. My advice is to create a new task, even if it is similar to the one you already created. Every task has specific information. When you try to reuse it, you can overwrite the specific data from another flow that is using the same task.

We have used this solution for six months.

There are some stability issues. Sometimes, the server crashes or throws out of memory. And the import/export function sometimes doesn’t work.

There have been no scalability issues.

The technical support is excellent.

The installation was straightforward. Although we faced some problems, we realize that our flow could be improved.

Don't reuse actions. It is better to create a new one. Otherwise, you could lose data.

• Continuous Integration is easy to automate.
• It can be integrated and used for handling releases for many different platforms and tools such as .Net, Java based Application Servers, load balancers, and many others using Standard Action Packs.
• It's easy to build flows using Standard Action Packs without writing any scripts.
• It includes plug-ins to integrate with different ITSM and Source Control tools to automate deployments with REST API.

• We've integrated it with our ticketing system to automatically trigger deployments and update tickets accordingly, saving a lot of manual effort.
• Our number of successful deployments have also increased exponentially.

• Error message descriptions need to be more accurate and specific.
• Error handling needs to be improved in some of the action packs. 
• UI is a little complicated to understand for the new user and needs some improvements.

The product provides readily-available actions to use in the deployment process. The external connectors are made available to integrate the tool with other SCM applications.

This is purely an automation tool which has helped us to move from traditional manual deployments to zero-touch deployments.

This product lacks proper documentation with illustrated examples.

I've used it for three years.

5/10 - CA has bought this product recently from Nolio and does not have much expertise available to answer our queries.

Be ready to struggle for documentations and tutorials. You have to do this based on your previous knowledge.