Nolio Release Automation Reviews

• 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.

• UI-based orchestration
• Ease of use of the application from anyone who is technical to completely non-tech folk
• Great visualization and consolidation of reports across the organization

• Better integration with new-age tools
• Open-source integrations
• Establish a niche with newer players like Chef and Ansible

We have used Release Automation for 6-7 years.

It did not scale efficiently to multiple domains for NES. Upgrades are expensive in terms of effort.

I give technical support 3/5.

Initial setup was extremely complex due to infrastructure challenges and the specs required to get this implemented.

We implemented it with an in-house team.

It’s a great tool if the developers and ops are separate and the developers do not want to spend a lot of time configuring deployments.

The best thing that it offers us is the opportunity to streamline our deployment so that we can have serial and horizontal dependencies. We have been able to stack multiple different server type deployments along the database deployments, have them all dependent on each other appropriately and report out the successes or problems at the end of the process.

We have the repeatability, we have the confidence that it's doing the same thing each time the way we've set it up to do and just being able to have the expectation of knowing exactly what's going to happen in the order that our infrastructure needs it to happen.

We rely on it quite often. We use it many, many times during the course of a week or a month and it's held up for us, so it's doing what we need it to do.

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing different kinds of scheduling options and being able to troubleshoot more real time if something does go wrong. Those would be two things that would be very helpful to us.

Deployment was pretty big and there were a lot of dependencies between the different components and we just weren't able to make it work manually.

Scalability, we have added in more and more. We don't have the largest implementation by any means but we've got a very complex system and we add more to it on a regular basis as our application grows.

It goes back quite a few years that we've been using this and at the time we were either going to do a homegrown solution or this. Those were the two options.

The software deployment tool.

It's a lot easier to deploy software through CA than using a manual process or through GPOs. Packaging and client's hardware/software information recovery are handy features, as is the feedback on license management.

Maybe the user interface. We always can do something simpler, even for professionals.

I've been using it for six months.

None that I remember.

It was reliable.

I've not had experience with customer service.

I've not had experience with technical support.

I used Numara Software by BMC, but it wasn't a switch, though; it only was another customer.

Overall, it's a great product, but not that user friendly concerning the deployment server configuration/management.

I really appreciate the Deployment Pipeline where you can see the environment and release version artifact that was deployed and whether it was successful (green) or failed (red) for each application.

The release deployment pipeline in CA RA is the most valuable feature of them all, as it shows the environment and the release version currently deployed for each application.

It has enabled us to provide continuous delivery and deployment for all 4 environments (DEV, QA, stage, prod) with promotion steps for each environment.

I don't think there are enough action packs for each App Deployment function.

There is also a lack of online documentation or step-by-step guides, especially for the CA RA product.

I have used it for 8 months.

We encountered no stability issues.

We did encounter some scalability issues. Only active/passive mode is available for this product and not high availability mode like other products.

We found the technical support to be very low level.

I used Puppet Labs as a configuration management tool and compared it to CA Release Automation. The products are completely different in features, functions and methodology.

The initial CA RA setup is complex for getting you started but after you understand the way it distributes artifacts to its agent and the deployment phases, it then becomes quite easy to handle.

It has its cost and can be considered to be more expensive compared to other solutions.

We did not evaluate other options.

Learn your application's components (backend, frontend, DB) before you start working with CA RA. You also need to teach CA RA the artifact type and version for each deployment. It is best for you to first manually deploy then teach CA RA how to automate it.

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.