Nolio Release Automation Reviews

Nolio is primarily used for production deployments, including web apps and data system deployments. We use various deployment types within the tool. Nolio is the official deployment tool at Barclays for all production-related tasks.

One standout aspect is its architecture. We can configure multiple instances on a single server using different system names or usernames. 

Another feature I like is that the graphical user interface is user-friendly and aids in efficient design and deployment.

One of the major value we assigned the tool is it's a agent-based deployment tool. Our job is pushing code through all, consistently, 24/7 so we want the tool to handle our deployment volume.

The benefits: we are able to deliver more. Our release volume doubled up but our release window went down by 80% so we deliver more and faster.

One, it's agent-based. It allows us to do multiple things at once as opposed to serially, which we had a home grown tool that did it serially. We've reduced our time frames. I think the pre-codified actions for doing the release activities, also is a major benefit. It's something that we don't have to write scripts for, they're already written. We just need to pull them together. Those are the two major things.

The other thing that the tool does that we're beginning to realize is it's addressing what Gartner's calling this bi-modal approach. What we're realizing is that Mode 1, which is your old legacy type of approach, which is why we got the tool. It's fantastic for, but now the new fast speeds using it in the Mode 2 type thing, we're finding it bullet-proof there as well.

One of the key benefits, what really we're looking at is the quality of the releases, not necessarily the code quality, but the actual deployments and the speed at which we're doing it. Things that we automate are taking upwards of 8 to 10 times less. Now, what we can do is we can do 3 to 4 times more on a release. We just had our largest release ever. Without CA Release Automation, there's no way we could deliver that level of code to our end-customers. It's very stable.

The frictionless end-to-end, automated deployments. Before we did manual deployments working with different parties, we removed those handovers which makes it frictionless. It’s fault-tolerant without human errors; it's agnostic. It’s consolidated on one tool instead of multiple solutions with manual implementations.

Everyone deploys with the same tools – standardization; it makes the exchange of people within a large organization easier. Transparency, risk awareness, and it offers centralized solutions for compliance checks. Delivery to customers is also much faster, whether it’s an internal or external customer.

The graphical view of when you're writing flow is the most valuable feature.

We want to expand our work to Amazon or Azure to the public cloud. We have Kubernetes on-prem and I want to know if Nolio can handle it.

The most valuable features are the ability to shorten our release cycles and to reduce the number of mistakes we make.

It has significantly improved the workload balance of the people that are part of my group. It's also helped us to have less business disruption and these are the primary ways in which it has helped our organization.

It's far more efficient and has helped us to get things done around 70 to 80% faster than before.

For our team, CA RA has made the one-click deployment a reality. It provides a web-based GUI with a convenient dashboard, Release Operations Center (ROC) to manage deployments, and agent health checks.

CA RA integrates seamlessly with multiple front-end, DB, and MW technologies. The time savings for repetitive tasks is tremendous.

It also provides role-based, user administration where the DEV and QA were given access to use CA RA as a self-service tool. They use it to perform the deployments to their environments in the exact same way as the Release Ops team would deploy it to the controlled environments.

This helps isolate any issues that can occur in controlled environments to artifacts/ENV configurations. This helps us to catch issues quicker and improve our delivery times.

This product provides pre-built action packs for many of the most popular platforms and appliances. The product allows users to create custom actions when action packs are not yet available. This allows us to leverage this studio across our entire organization.

We have seen significant improvements in efficiency through the use of CA Release Automation by allowing us to standardize our deployment processes and automate those processes. This has decreased time-to-market for several of our teams and allowed our personnel to spend more time working on higher value tasks.