Features
The Nolio solution is designed around the specific requirements of enterprise application releases and deployments. This design includes unique capabilities, specifically engineered to enable reuse, segregation of duties, collaboration and zero touch deployment processes for any enterprise application across its lifecycle.
Application model
- Nolio has a built in application model made of components, tiers and environments.
- Nolio processes are assembled from reusable components which you design for your various application tiers.
- Nolio lets you manage application specific environments (e.g, DEV, QA, Production etc..) for each application and control process execution per environment
Real-time dashboards
Built-in actions
- In addition to the ability to execute any existing scripts you may have, Nolio comes with ~500(and growing) built in actions to simplify the design of application deployment processes.
- Built actions exist for a huge range of application servers, middleware, databases, virtualization, load balancing and cloud management systems, all carefully designed with the needs of application deployment in mind (as opposed to infrastructure configuration for example).
- Each action can run under different credentials eliminating the need to "run as root".
- All actions can be looped over, assembled into sub flows, receive inputs and provide outputs
Full lifecycle support
Zero Touch Deployment™
- Nolio processes can be entirely parameterized and configured from external sources
- Many Nolio processes rely on external manifest files which enables complete reuse across releases and even for different types of releases (patch / new version etc.) using a single automation process.
Cross-tier synchronization rules
- Cross-tier synchronization in Nolio eliminates the need for bridge lines and chat rooms that are common during typical, multi-tiered application deployments.
- A couple of examples for this unique capability are:
- Only start with the application server upgrade once both a backup has been completed successfully and the databases have been successfully upgraded
- Remove a third of the application servers from the load balancer, stop the applications on the offline servers, upgrade the DB instances connected to those servers, upgrade the application servers, reconnect the upgraded application servers - loop for two more times on the remaining.
Release automatically to any environment with Zero Touch Deployment™Enterprise application readiness
- Nolio is designed with distributed applications in mind.
- Our architecture supports complete segregation of duties where processes can be designed and executed by different groups in remote locations.
- Privileges are managed per application, per process and per role within Nolio.
- Our 3 tier architecture supports globally distributed datacenters and remote locations.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Integration
- Nolio provides built in integration for ALM tools such as source control, build servers, binary management systems, automated testing, monitoring, change management and CMDBs.
- Integrations can trigger Nolio zero touch processes, send input and receive outputs from Nolio processes.
- For example, Nolio can be integrated with a Continuous Integration server such as Hudson/Jenkins or Microsoft TFS. Typically in such scenarios Nolio runs a zero touch deployment and verification process for any successfully completed build
- Another typical use case is to integrate Nolio with a change management system (such as ServiceNow) where access and control of Nolio deployment processes is embedded into the change control system and the automated processes continuously update the change management system.
Track and schedule releases
Collaboration: Nolio Release Calendar
Nolio's Google-like calendar interface shows past and pending releases in a single view. Data can be filtered by status, application, and environment. The calendar also provides a drill down to the exact step and process in every release, allowing user interaction with the executing releases. Release scheduling enables you to set when a release in a certain environment will run.
Take a complete release snapshot
Tagging Snapshots for Faster Rollbacks
You can use Nolio's 'tags' to mark processes at a particular revision, allowing them to be executed at any moment in time. Tags are an essential element to enable release snapshots. They make regression to previous versions for rollback simple. You can execute multiple versions of the same process in different environments, compare process versions and set up an environment based on a previous version of a process.
Full control over application releases
Approval Gates
Approval gates give managers and administrators more control over releases. They ensure that releases cannot be executed without appropriate managerial approvals. Environment managers or administrators can control everything that gets released into their environment.