Nolio Release Automation Reviews

• 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 most valuable features are the automation tools. We use them mainly for automating our application releases across various technologies. The tools have enabled us to reduce the downtime that is required to make any release. The release time has gone down from a number of days to a few minutes. I can get that done easier with this tool.

One of the main benefits is speed. I'm able to reduce the amount of time and resources necessary to do releases. With this solution, I'm able to bring the time down drastically.

I would like to see a more robust solution. There are few downsides which I already expressed to CA. I'm sure they will address them. For example, I would like to see more disaster recovery base solutions and things like that. I've already done that a few times.

The product has evolved a lot. I started my journey with Version 4.7 and now they have come up with Version 6.1. I'm seeing the product becoming more robust. I'm sure CA will make it even more robust in the coming years.

Scalability also got better over time. It was not scalable when we started with it. The product was designed primarily for small and medium scale organizations. I'm now seeing the product scaling up to large scale organizations. I'm sure they will improve this further down the road.

I have used technical support multiples times. They are very informative and helpful.

I was involved in the initial setup. The product is very simple to setup. Because I'm part of the financial industry, the setup was very complex. From the product perspective, it is not very complex to set up. In my case, I needed lot of failovers and things like that, so my implementation was complex.

When selecting a vendor, one of the most important aspects is the size. There are many small players in the industry, but when it comes to solutions, look at the kind of support that those companies can offer. That is a major factor. I would advise others to go with this solution.

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.

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.

There is a continuous delivery version of this product that I believe will solve some of the problems we have; so I'm looking forward to it. Currently we do deployment automation and I want to get to release automation, which is automating everything from start to end. That's what I'm looking for.

There are some technologies that this product doesn't support such as some emerging technologies that we need to build the interfaces for; so if that came as a readymade/off-the-shelf feature, it would help us.

We have been using it for 2 years.

So far, it has been very stable. We have been using it for 2 years and have had no issues. We have experienced some minor issues but nothing major.

We scaled it across our enterprise; we are using it across our entire enterprise.

We started using it for a couple of apps, i.e., somewhere between 40-45 applications; so it is quite good.

We haven’t used CA technical support. We use an account manager for support.

We didn't really use any other solution before. We were using a manual operation which was extremely intensive. Thus, the daily pain involved and the money that we were spending on it were the main reasons for us to lookout for another solution. Money and the time we spent were the biggest variables involved.

For us, it was important as to how quickly we could get started and how much the vendor was willing to invest in us. CA was willing to invest in us as much as we were willing to invest in them; that made the difference.

It was a very straightforward process. It took us a couple of weeks to set it up. I wasn’t involved in the process myself but was told by the technical team that it was easy.

We looked at a whole bunch of other solutions, namely XL Deploy from XebiaLabs.

The reason why we decided to choose CA was because of the completeness of this product, what it came up with and the fact that CA was willing to take a risk with us. They were not getting paid until we were successful in using the product and that made a big difference.

Just get into it and do it. It really makes your life better.

Although the product is good, I'm expecting a lot more from it.

We are still not using this solution for compliance and governance.

Their products are near the market. They cover everything that we need on the customers’ side. Their products also get frequently upgraded, so they keep apace with new technology and new stacks.

Everyone is trying to go into continuous delivery using a continuous integration model. We need to connect all our tools together to see which products are helping us orchestrate all our tools to speed up delivery.

We need to see how they're going to harness Big Data in terms of Java.net, distributed stack, and going into the mainframe.

Whenever we pick a new solution and we try to install it, there are some hiccups in the initial stage. Once that is done, I think the issues are small.

As far as I know, the new products are scalable. I think that all of their products are scalable. CA takes care of scalability. They build their products so they can be scaled up.

Recently I used support for CA Rally, and I think it was really good. We got good support. They were able to resolve our issues and queries.

Originally, there was no solution. Then there was a solution, but it was in small cell buckets. Now the solutions are getting integrated together.

I've been part of certain POCs and the pilot. I think it was straightforward, not complex. But in some scenarios, it is complex. The level of complexity actually depends on which tool we are picking. On average, it is actually moderately complex.

I think everything is good with CA.

The most important criteria in selecting a vendor is whether it is satisfying in terms of your needs. The second factor is the cost.

A valuable feature of this product is faster delivery time. Initially, we had 4 days for deployment which has now changed to only a few minutes for core deployment. For database schema changes, we are performing automated deployment.

Previously, we were hiring external contractors who were responsible for deployment. Now, we have removed them from the equation and instead we are using this tool. This has benefited us, not just in terms of costs for paying the external vendors but also enables faster delivery time, that has been reduced from days to a couple of hours.

We would like mainframe automation deployment. It is one of the biggest components in our organization. For distributed applications, we obviously need to have more on the mainframe, as well, so that we can have 100% accomplishment. So, we would like to see mainframe automation.

It is good and is doing what it is supposed to do. I don't see any challenges. After observing the success rate for deployment, we are getting more participation from different applications; so, it is doing good as expected.

We have experienced no scalability issues. The agents are always up and running, so no complaints.

For any product enhancements or any challenges/issues experienced, we have used the technical support. It is good and responsive.

We were not using any other product prior to this one. We were carrying out the entire process manually.

I was not involved in the setup process but we were involved in product evaluation.

This is one of the best tools that we have. It is helping us to meet our automation goals and to reach 100% DevOps enablement. I would suggest to all those interested to first evaluate this tool and then go for it.

Mainframe automation is one of the biggest challenges for us and currently the product doesn’t address it. We hire external contractors that carry out the deployment process and the cost for each deployment works out to around $400. Automating this process can save us huge amounts of money and time.

This product is one of the key pillars for us. The three main vertical stacks involved are building, testing and deployment. This tool addresses release automation completely, which is one of the key components in DevOps. Deployment of mainframe components delivery is an outstanding feature. I wouldn’t say that it is giving a 360-degree view but it is working good in terms of distributed applications.

The compliance and governance process is completely isolated from deployment. Currently, we still use the service for Change Management and Release Management processes. This will continue but we are not integrating with release automation; it will be isolated.

We were using an in-house developed release tool, but we wanted to achieve better orchestration in our workflow. We wanted to be able to release more frequently and have greater visibility for our team. CA Release Automation gave us the flexibility to deploy multiple components in multiple environments. We do data warehousing so we have Java and WebLogic components, as well as web services, and everything can be deployed with a single tool. I really value that. As one who designed our release workflow, with the help of my team, I think that CA Release Automation is a very, very good product. We can now deploy whenever we want. We have more visibility with more logins. Our users are very happy too.

Right now, our developers are very, very excited to use it. We can release multiple code features at one time. That is the biggest benefit. In large projects, there are often code dependencies between applications. Now, we have set up a list of dependencies, with the help of expert's at CA technical support. If we have for example, one application that is dependent on two more applications, we can deploy all three together. None of the applications will be down. They are always current with the latest features. That's what I love about it.

As of now, we are looking into continuous development. This will be taken into consideration as management makes the final decision. We are evaluating quite a few options. We are going to implement that very soon.

We also have implemented rules for compliance and governance. We have created multiple environments and every user group has access to the different environments. We restrict users from accessing higher environments without approval.

I know that continuous delivery's already coming, but I still need to see how it will work out. What I personally want to see is more features for data warehousing deployment. Right now, I prefer Informatica. We want an action pack to deploy completely on Informatica. All actions for DB2 and its SQL servers are implemented and almost all the actions for WebLogic. I would love to see something coming out for Informatica.

I believe it's pretty stable. Of course, there are chances of improvement in any tool or any application. But CA Release Automation is a pretty stable application where one core piece can communicate to multiple sources and targets, which I love personally.

It can be scaled up to more than 2,000 action items. We are using about 400 actions as of now. However, due to the complex flow we use for internal company needs, we are actually doing more than a thousand.

Technical support is very good. They have always been available.

We were using an in-house developed release tool, but wanted better orchestration for our releases.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did encounter a few issues, such infrastructure configuration, but I didn't think there was any major problems.

First, when you adapt your solution of Release Automation, you need to know what you actually want. What do you need, why you are doing what you're doing? Second, if the product satisfies your needs today, you need to look five years into the future. For the next five years, what are you going to achieve; then make the decision. I think Release Automation would help a lot.

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.

The process design tools included are easy to use and very good at deploying applications across various platforms and operating systems.

Applications that have been on boarded into the Release Automation application have shown a decrease in deployment time and down time for maintenance.

The system seems unstable as we are constantly having to re-connect execution servers and agents that go offline. In addition, the upgrade process has been painful in our experience and we usually run into issues requiring support assistance.

Personally, I have been using this product for just over two years. As a company, we have been using this product for about 3 and a half years.

If an agent or execution server is offline then the deployment will not start as the product cannot reach the servers that it needs to deploy to.

Yes, stability is a persistent issue for us. We spend an average of 1 - 2 hours a week troubleshooting offline agents. I am told that a lot of these issues have been addressed in the 6.2 version that is now available and we are in the process of upgrading.

The product seems to be incredibly stable. We currently fluctuate between 50 and 100 agents in our environment with no issue. I understand that there are companies utilizing 1000 - to 1500 agents. The architecture is easily scaled to accommodate high quantities of agents spanning multiple physical locations.

Excellent. CA is always quick to respond and has a workaround to get us up and going in a reasonable amount of time. They have taken the time to understand our issues and what our visions are.

Fair. Determining a root cause for an issue or receiving any sort of permanent solution involving a code level change can span weeks or even months because technical resources seem limited on CA's side.

CA's reps have been extremely helpful in my experience. They take the time to understand what you are trying to do and then propose solutions and pricing with room for scaling based on resources and budget constraints. This product is licensed based on the number of agents (servers) in the environment so that is a consideration each time we on board a new product into the Release Automation application.

If the stability issues are truly addressed in the latest version of the product then I would absolutely recommend this product to anyone looking for a good way to standardize and report on deployments for various applications spanning multiple platforms and physical locations.

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.