TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

IBM Cloud Foundry

Score6 out of 10

94 Reviews and Ratings

Get a Demo

What is IBM Cloud Foundry?

IBM Cloud Foundry is an IBM version of the open-source platform designed for building, testing, deploying, and scaling applications. Enterprises can run Cloud Foundry in a public isolated environment, while natively integrating with other IBM Cloud services, such as AI, Blockchain, and IoT.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features IBM Cloud Foundry has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 94 ratings of IBM Cloud Foundry's features
View all features

Top Performing Features

  • Platform access control

    Rules controlling what data different user categories can access

    Category average: 7.8

  • Scalability

    Ease of scaling up or down to meet demand

    Category average: 8.2

  • Platform management overhead

    Resources required to keep platform up and running

    Category average: 7.4

Areas for Improvement

  • Ease of building user interfaces

    Ability to build flexible user interfaces using drag-and-drop tools

    Category average: 7.9

  • Development environment replication

    Ease of replicating new development environments

    Category average: 7.7

  • Issue monitoring and notification

    Integrated monitoring and notification of issues and problems

    Category average: 7.3

Reviews

What users are saying about IBM Cloud Foundry.
View all reviews

A multi-cloud and industry-standard Platform-as-a-Service Solution

Incentivized
Amir YaqoobView profile
Software Quality Assurance Engineer in Engineering at Nextbridge Ltd. (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cloud Foundry is one of the most powerful, highly scalable, and widely used platforms that not only offers IaaS and PaaS cloud services, but also helps us in building new apps or migrating old ones. It helps us in on-prem and off-prem deployments as well as bringing all of these elements together in the cloud for our ease and to help us solve real-world, difficult business challenges on this single platform effectively. IBM Cloud Foundry ensures that the build and deploy elements of coding are meticulously coordinated with any attached services, [ensuring] application iteration is swift, consistent, and dependable.

Pros

  • IBM Cloud Foundry is an easy, efficient, and multi-cloud platform to support users in the management, development, and continuous delivery of other applications.
  • Linking a custom domain to an IBM Cloud Foundry-hosted PaaS application is simple.
  • IBM Cloud Foundry offers well-explained and clear picture log errors to help users to figure out what's truly wrong and why the application isn't being pushed to the cloud or isn't working.

Cons

  • Its online UI can become unresponsive or hang due to heavy usage, but we always have the CLI as a backup.
  • When attempting to deploy larger Meteor-based applications, it frequently fails.

Return on Investment

  • IBM Cloud Foundry is a powerful deployment model that is easy to manage and use, its simplicity of usage has eliminated the need for IT experts and cut our costs down.
  • The multi-cloud IBM Cloud Foundry has allowed us to eliminate an entire class of financial risks and protect us from losses in the development of applications by providing us with the right information.

Alternatives Considered

Cloudways

Other Software Used

Skype for Business (formerly Lync), now part of Microsoft Teams, Trello, Slack

Easy Deployment with IBM Cloud Foundry with High Security

Incentivized
Yatharth GargView profile
Operations Coordinator in Sales at Abhivriddhi - Student Training & Development Cell, VIT Pune (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • High scalablity
  • Easy integration with few clicks
  • High security provided
  • Free allowance in every 30 days

Cons

  • Needs better documentation
  • Better support required
  • Needs to improve on flexibility for setting resources
  • Tough to access third party APIs

Return on Investment

  • Best option for autoscaling within budget
  • Flexibility with multiple language option

Alternatives Considered

Dynatrace Network Application Monitoring (NAM), formerly DCRUM, Azure Application Gateway and Azure App Service

CF - Easy to use from setup of environment to development then production

Incentivized
Alabi TemitopeView profile
Software Engineer in Engineering at Josla Electric Company Limited (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Hassle free linking of custom domain to hosted application on IBM Cloud Foundry
  • Flexibility in hosting application on IBM Cloud with easy terminal command availability for all settings which is required to set up IBM Cloud Foundry instance for that project
  • Well detailed explainable log errors to guide the user on what is really wrong , why the application was not push to cloud or not live
  • Properly index error in search engine which often list IBM forums url within the top 5 when you search with keywords from the terminal log errors you copied
  • Availability of IBM Cloud Foundry SDK on major languages with sample implementation code for the selected language

Cons

  • Major improvement I think is currently needed is sponsor more seminars in tech related field because I could search and see more content on youtube compare to other IBM resources which I have to rely solely on the IBM documentation to implement it
  • Properly index documentation on search engine optimization on how to point Cloud Foundry Application to a host on another platform
  • Partner with Massive Open Online Courses like udacity to create video content on software development track with free tiers to host on the resources during learning
  • Have issues when the domain doesn't come with ssl certificates and I upload generate Lets encrypt ssl to the custom domain interface after I install it, the domain won't be secure . I will want you to investigate this issue

Return on Investment

  • Positive impact, it helps to prevent memory resources where by I can adjust default memory allocated for an application instance which I know that the memory usage won't grow significantly.
  • Provide trust opportunity for developers with their clients without charging the IBM Cloud Foundry users when they make use secure test domain.
  • It help to increase profit margin which the cost of hosting on this platform is market affordable with what other competitor offers which they don't even give free ssl for test domain.

Alternatives Considered

Heroku Platform, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Firebase

Other Software Used

IBM Cloudant, IBM Watson Assistant, IBM Cloud Object Storage, Firebase, Google Cloud Storage, Cloudinary

Cloud Foundry Usage

Incentivized
Peter NorteyView profile
Web Developer in Information Technology at Ecexshop (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Good Scaling
  • Easy to use
  • Variety of Languages

Cons

  • Not suitable for deploying large apps
  • The user interface needs improvement

Return on Investment

  • Increased website performance

Alternatives Considered

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and Docker

Other Software Used

Azure App Service, Azure Container Instances, Google BigQuery

Easy move to the cloud

Incentivized
victor pease solanoView profile
General Manager in Engineering at Supermio (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Easy move from local to the cloud for web apps and APIs.
  • You can run IBM Cloud Foundry locally for testing.
  • There is a free allowance every 30 days.
  • Of course, you can take your apps back or move them to other kinds of hosting.

Cons

  • Something like a scripting way to automate start/stop your cells so you can control or divide APIs you just need for a limited time.
  • The pricing calculator is not considering the cost for the whole month.
  • The IBM SDK is now deprecated so that means your actual SDK can be supported. More clarification is required on this.

Return on Investment

  • Be careful. There is a cost even if you don't use the capacity. So you have to consider always, high volume apps to be moved first, especially those that are required 24x7.
  • Be honest. That app installed on a beast of 32 GB of RAM may just need 8 GB or 16.
  • Be tidy. The best approach is to group apps and maybe merge them so you can use less Diego cells (or App units). Remember that there is a cost for unused capacity.
  • Be cheap. Check from time to time if you don't need an app or service and turn it off. Remember you are paying for it and you have an allowance of 375 GB/hour per month.
  • Monitor all the time. Not just availability, check for utilization, traffic, cost. Your migration to the cloud is not completed by uploading your code, just by being sure that you have the right platform at the right cost.
  • The local hardware that you are leaving behind: Consider how old it is, maintenance, power, software licenses, availability, technical support cost and be sure about the real cost to know if your cloud services can be below that limit.

Alternatives Considered

Azure API Management, Heroku and OpenShift

Other Software Used

Node, Oracle Database 12c, SQL Server Integration Services, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Related Products

Products similar to IBM Cloud Foundry that may also meet your needs.
All comparisons
Microsoft Azure
CompareLearn more
Google Cloud Platform
CompareLearn more