Nolio Release Automation Reviews

• 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.

Using a VPL to configure a release process is a valuable feature. A VPL is a visual programming language where you program visually instead of normal coding.

It has improved the working of our organization by:

• Accelerating the release development process
• Enabling smaller development teams to achieve faster development times

The level of abstraction in the VPL needs to improve. There needs to be some improvement in the technical issues, in order to better relate with the machine's infrastructure and network support.

For it to work properly, a VPL must abstract the concept to where it applies, which in this case is a release process. Although in my opinion it is very nice to see it applied in this process in the market, I found, however, that it still needed to improve and abstract more in the aspects of infrastructures, where they were applied. This could make the process more easier for the batch setting variables for an instance.

I have used this product for approximately six months.

Some deployment issues were experienced when dealing with some unexpected network case's architecture.

The technical support is good from CA's part.

I worked as a consultant, so we had very different tools applied. It all depended on the client itself.

It ended a bit more complex than it should. The variables customization per environment formed a cluster of boxes, in the beginning, for instances.

We implemented this product through a vendor team in order to simplify the process and abstract the maximum from the old ways of the release process.

Look at it as a fresh start and a "clean" environment without any need of prior release methods. You can use it to simplify most of the processes.

It is a good product but still needs some improvement.

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 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.

The automation designer GUI slows down the host when it is launched. The reporting feature is not excellent. You cannot import/export the workflows effectively between multiple CA RA environments.

Additionally, this product is only able to automate the technology actions when the technology vendor provides CLI, web service calls, and an API for automation. It does not have the capability to connect to the GUI directly and perform sequential actions.

I have had extensive, hands-on implementation experience with this solution for about four years.

We did have stability issues. The tool slows down often. If any agents were to go offline or are in a hung state, we do not discover this until after the deployment has been triggered. The workaround for this is to leverage a third-party monitoring tool to ensure that it polls the agents 24/7 and takes the necessary configured action if the agent were to have any issues.

Scalability was never an issue with this product. However, my experience with the product is limited to having up to 1000 target deployment servers registered on the tool. No redesign is expected as we continue to add servers after the initial PoC of a dozen servers.

The technical support is very prompt and knowledgeable. They go the extra mile to ensure that you meet your end result.

We used legacy UNIX deployment scripts to perform automated deployments through CLI. Maintaining the scripts was a tremendous overhead for the release operations team. These scripts had to be regularly updated to ensure that they can deploy the latest and greatest technologies to which the company was switching.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

This solution is pricey compared to its peers.

We evaluated XL Deploy and UrbanCode Deploy.

This product has become invaluable in terms of saving time and improving time to market. If these are your pain points, you must include this product on your shortlist.

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.

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.

The learning curve for this tool is somewhat steep. While setting up a basic deployment process is simple, improving those processes to include integration into monitoring tools or implementing complex deployment processes can be a challenege. Making the product more intuitive, specifically around process design, would be a great improvement.

I have used this product for two years. we have implemented automated deployment processes for several platforms and continue to look for more platforms to leverage this tool against.

None

There were no issues with stability.

We discovered that administrators can build application deployment processes in certain ways that will cause deployment agents to get hung if you attempt concurrent deployments to the same physical hosts. This has more to do with the learning curve on how to build the processes than the product itself.

Six out of ten.

I would rate technical support with a 6 out of 10. A great deal of the support comes from the user community. This is valuable, but sometimes they are not as well informed as an SME.

We used several different solutions to achieve similar results. One of the biggest advantages for us in choosing this solution was the ability to incorporate, build, deploy, and test functionality in a single pane of glass.

The initial setup of the tool itself was fairly straightforward. Setup of the individual application designs requires a comprehensive understanding of the application involved as well as getting everyone to agree on a standardized build and deployment process.

Licensing concerns play an important role in how you standardize your deployment process. Where possible, take advantage of clustering capabilities that allow you to deploy to a single host and push the deployments out to all the members of the cluster.

We had an environment where each development team had their own set of tools for building packages and all deployment was manual. The evaluation of this product included reviewing the capabilities of Jenkins and Visual Studio.

When engaging technical services to assist in implementing this product, make sure you have thought out your requirements and documented them very specifically. Ask for reference calls with other customers to get their feedback on common pitfalls.

I really appreciate how easy and fast it is develop a flow that can deploy artifacts and applications.

As a simple example, we had a manual process to publish static files on a web server. Due to the large number of files and the need to do manual work using another tool, it used to take us six hours to complete it. With this tool, it now it takes us around five minutes.

CA Release Automation has a large number of actions and it fits the needs in 99% of the cases. However, sometimes a specific function/behavior is needed and we are forced to call an external command to solve the problem. For example, in regards to the SVN actions, I had a problem where I needed to check for lock and unlock, if needed. However, I could only achieve this by using an external script.

I have used this solution for one year.

The product is pretty stable.

It is possible to have a lot of execution servers, but you can’t put them in a balanced pool of servers. In the majority of cases, agents will be used to reach one specific machine.

When executing a remote command, such as JDBC, it is ineffective to use only one specific server. This will be a single point of failure.

I would give technical support the highest possible rating.

We previously used a different solution.

CA Release Automation really makes life easier as follows:

• Has a large number of available actions.
• Has deployment pipeline and approval gateway features that increase security to the deployment flow.
• Integrates with service desk tools.

It is really straightforward to install and configure. However, it takes some days to fully understand how to properly use the tool due to the large number of features.

There are cheaper, or even free tools, but I guarantee that getting this solution is worth the price.

We evaluated Bamboo, HP Codar, and Serena Deployment Automation.

Try to study every single feature. This will make it possible to develop really professional deployment flows.

The valuable features are:

• Ability to keep the map of different environments in a single tool.
• Ability to design and manage DevOps activity from a graphical point of view.
• Ability to manage large installations with more than 5,000 servers due to its 100% scalable architecture.

This has helped our organization with several kinds of projects:

• Projects with more than 5,000 servers and daily deployments.
• Projects in which we have to manage the deployment in a cloud environment based on the monitoring. As the number of users grows, we must deploy a cloud environment and deploy the applications. If the number of users decreases, we have to uninstall the applications and release the cloud infrastructure.
• Deployment of applications in a continuous integration environment, including deployment, QA, pre-production, and production environments.

I would like to see integration with other technologies, such as Docker.

We have used this solution for over five years.

There have been stability issues, but they will be solved with the collaboration of CA teams.

There have been no scalability issues. It is very important to do a correct design of the architecture ahead of time.

The technical support is good.

I used open source solutions like Puppet and Chef. These solutions require a high level of expertise and are difficult to maintain in large installations. For this kind of project, it is better to use commercial tools, such as CA products.

The installation was simple. But if you want to use the tool in large installations, there are some tricks you must know.

It is an expensive tool and the licensing model is difficult to sell.

We looked into open-source tools, XebiaLabs, and IBM.

Begin with a little project and grow it progressively. If you need a number of projects, get help from professional services.

CA RA supports most of the OSs (unix, Linux, Windows) out there used in corporate environments. So one of the most valuable features is flexibility, as you can deploy virtually any app on any OS using this platform.

It has reduced deployment times from nearly a couple of hours to around a couple of minutes, especially on production environments.

Tags are virtual snapshots of different deployment processes. Over time, if you often update your processes, it gets hard to track what exact changes were made between the different tags of the same process. This functionality is not working. Therefore, it would be great if the vendor could improve the processes tag comparison feature for better process version control.

I have been using CA Release Automation since 2014.

I have not encountered any particular issues, as all I had to do is the agent software installation and configuration. The vendor and a supporting team installed the system servers.

Unfortunately, all we used for deployments previously was custom scripts, so I can’t compare here anything.

When it comes to agent install, it’s pretty straightforward. I can’t comment on the server installs.

A vendor team installed the server-side software.

It is a really great and flexible tool for corporate-grade deployments, but I would strongly recommend investing in training sessions from the vendor. It's a steep learning curve if you will have to learn the tool on your own.

As an engineering program manager, I was responsible for making sure that we're taking the 43 steps that are our manual process, and automating those. That actually takes our software delivery to our set-top boxes and automates the process to send this technology up to the satellites and down to set-top box. It's total automation of a manual process.

Basically, right now, it takes our software configuration management team and our download configuration management team 4-5 hours to be able to encapsulate the software with the necessary header information to be able to send it to the satellites, so that it then could go down to the set-top boxes. Through the automation process, we're trying to reduce that to a 30-minute process.

How the product could really improve is when we were actually given the product and started to implement it, we were looking to CA to provide best-case scenarios. But because we're so unique, we had no templates to work off of. CA could really work together with their other product lines to give us guidance on governance on how to implement the product; that would be great.

We've been implementing this solution for approximately one year.

What we actually did is, we took our software and moved it to another location that makes it incorporated into our infrastructure up at the up-link center. By doing that, the stability of the solution allows us to be able to do more real-time work, rather than trying to have to do manual entry.

Unlike a lot of the different CA Release Automation products, we actually are very unique in what we're doing. We're actually having to take the software and put into steps that allows us to stop the software automatically, send it out for approvals, get all the approvals signed and back to us, then continue the automation process.

The scalability allowed us to be able to do that. It also allowed us to be able to run multiple processes at the same time. Again, being able to look at our product and being able to target specific set-top boxes or groups of boxes.

Tech support at CA has been very good during our implementation process. When we have technical questions that we need to get back into engineering because we are a very unique type of implementation, they've been very responsive.

EchoStar actually has CA Technologies Release Automation implemented in another team, so we're partnered with the other team. We looked at the product in comparison to building custom applications ourselves and found that using CA technology was the best solution.

What I look for from a vendor is somebody with the technical skills that has the knowledge of the best solutions, best practices; and that has a support team that we can draw on, call on, and that we can then use as mentors as we bring our team up to speed.

We work with CA's technology group for implementation. The setup was actually very straightforward. Because of the components we have involved, we're doing a lot of customizations to the product and then, again going back to scalability, allowed us to scale to those customizations.

It is very customizable; it's very easy to use, to be able to actually put the product together, to build those different workflows that we needed to build; and also with its ability of having the technical staff.

The continuous-delivery journey is that we are going from a total manual process to total automation. Our next phases would be including being able to actually automate the sending of the data up to the satellites, down to set-top boxes.

For governance, we set up a list of metrics for program managers, for senior managers, and for department managers; for time to delivery of the software; and for error reduction. We're trying to reduce our error rate from 33% errors on our software builds, down to 0. We're using the metrics for that. We're also, again, using our metrics to look at the delivery time.