Nolio is a very good tool. It's highly effective for deployment tasks and even supports one-touch deployment across various environments. When you design a process template, it can be reused across different scenarios. 

It's particularly valuable for database management and web applications. In comparison to Microsoft Kubernetes and other operations, database deployment can become complex, whereas Nolio is a very nice tool in the deployment arena.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten because I don't know all the hidden features. Once I gain a comprehensive understanding of these features, I might be able to give a more definitive rating. 

Initially, when I started learning about Nolio, I found it somewhat challenging. However, over time, I discovered that it's a valuable and well-designed tool.

Without stability issues and all those internal escalations, it would be a 7 or 8/10. Organize your culture first, then process, then look at which tool you’re going to use.

My recommendation would be: a) buy the tool, b) recognize that it's a journey. It's not something that it's a binary thing that's going to happen overnight. You've got to continually sell it and treat it as an ongoing initiative. We're post the projectization of it, and we're still bringing people on board to the process. I would recognize that this is a continuous delivery, if you will, exercise that I don't think ever stops because your code and your code base is constantly evolving. There are things that you can continually do, integrate it with your change management environments, integrate it with some of the other DevOps tools that you can't even imagine what you can do with it. I would say, recognize that it is a great foundation for your release automation, but it doesn't stop there. This tool is holding up to the new requirements that are coming, and that's what we really like about the tool is as the world evolves, this tool is stable. It's stable and it's able to adapt.

The reason I'd rate it 8/10 is because it is a very strong, stable deployment engine. It's very scalable. It fits really well with our deployment process.

Recommendations: first look at their current processes. How they do the release, how they do the deployments. Look for all the tools. What tool will fit into their process? When you buy new tools, you want to make sure it fits very well to the process.

The measurement we take is only two factors. The number of changes going into production and how long it takes. We are able to deliver more. We doubled our release volume but stayed within the same release window. We are able quickly, on board application for automation. Previously, it used to take weeks and months to automate an application because they're all skill based application. Repeatable and reusable process in the tool, we build a deployment process. We just onboard an application to the automation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's a nice tool. I think that in the next version, 6.7, they will have more features. Features like supporting Kubernetes.

I would rate Nolio a six out of ten.

In the next release, I would like to see more features to use active directory. And more rules to support more Python scripts and to work with Kubernetes and clouds, to have an easy solution for a lot of parameters.

When selecting a vendor the solution cost and total cost of ownership are definitely two of the criteria; the product quality, usability, scalability, of course, and the support are key as well. The company's market situation is also important. We cannot afford to go into some risky business because it's a long-term investment, especially when it comes to deployment automation.

If I were to consider investing in a new deployment automation tool, I wouldn't switch to CA Release Automation, because of the CA strategy. They don't invest in it anymore. From a strategic perspective, I think it's probably not the best tool to invest in.

I would definitely consider Automic. I think Automic is a leader, and I think from a features perspective, Automic is very comparable with UCD. I think XebiaLabs XL Deploy is becoming much more popular, but it's more for release automation. There are companies around that combine UrbanCode Deploy and XebiaLabs XL Deploy.

I would rate CA Release Automation at seven out of 10. It's a good and mature product but there is no future investment expected in it from CA's side. It's a stable product. It provides the features we need, but I am concerned that, long-term, the technology support might be an issue and a reason I would not give it a 10; that and because of the upgrade challenges we had.

Do a PoC of the product and weigh the cons and benefits, before buying the actual licenses.

This solution is a great tool. In my opinion, it's the number one tool on the market right now, and I've done some research into other options. 

I'd recommend this solution to others. Many people don't realize that things can be virtualized like this. It can be very easy. All the requirements are right there in one click. It's simple to use. People should try it.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Begin with a small project and grow it progressively. If you need a large project, you should acquire professional services.

To be fair, I think that there are a lot of things that it is capable of: deploying out; integrating with other products. The UI and the design can sometimes be a little flaky, and that is a little frustrating at different points, but overall, it's definitely a solution, if you're looking for an enterprise product to do your releases for multiple types of deployments.

I never give out perfect ratings. I think it's going to be a good, stable product. I know CDD's fairly new. We're doing new things with it. It's exciting that it can be scalable enough to accommodate our part of the production.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would definitely recommend it to whosoever wants a good solution for their automation, deployment and release management.

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

Methodology to model the deployment process and the communication between development and operation are the most important.

You also have to define your requirements in order to choose the best product, if you can’t CA Release Automation is the most flexible product to adapt itself to your organization.

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

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.

Setup standard installations for all Operating Systems instances. In the long run this practice will gain time for the implementation process.

It is a very good product and can help the organizations in the long run, which will lead to higher customer satisfaction.

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.

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.

I would suggest v3.0 with all the plug-ins, which provides a lot more depth in using the product. There’s also a lot of technical support, customer service, and other online support options with that release.

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.

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.

It's a good product that has a huge set of actions which can help with deployment.

You need to have good expertise and flexible, and a conducive environment.

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

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

Start with a proof-of-concept with a complex application on your end.

This product provides a continuous delivery solution and full automation without writing and scripting.

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.

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

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.

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.