IBM Cloud Foundry Information Reviews & Insights

Score6 out of 10

94 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for IBM Cloud Foundry are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Simplicity and Quick Setup: Users have appreciated the simplicity of IBM Cloud Foundry, noting that the command line tool provided allowed them to get up and running within minutes. This ease of setup has been crucial for users who value a straightforward onboarding process.

Feature-Rich Platform: Reviewers have found IBM Cloud Foundry to be feature-rich, providing essential cloud-based platform features like auto-scaling and zero downtime deployment. The inclusion of these features has enhanced the overall user experience and functionality of the platform.

High Scalability: The high scalability of IBM Cloud Foundry was highlighted as a positive aspect by users. Being able to easily scale resources based on their needs has proven beneficial for users managing varying workloads efficiently.

IBM Cloud Foundry Reviews

10 Reviews

InformationComputer Software8Telecommunications1Information Services1

Cloud Foundry is a super PaaS Service

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 25, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Cloud Foundry to deploy with a few clicks a secure and scalable web app using a simple web console. Our web app needed to have a CD/CI integration. Cloud Foundry helps us to have user-friendly PaaS.

Pros

Easy to use
Scalable
Very easy to add routes
Nice UI/UX

Cons

App logs are sorted by date but in the other direction (old logs are shown first).
Not possible to switch off the service automatically.
Difficulty in changing web server settings using Buildpaks.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are a developer, it is the perfect service to write code without having trouble with the infrastructure settings. If you are an architect, probably you need something with more options to manage.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Computer Software company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Under no circumstance would I recommend Cloud Foundry to anyone for any reason

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

May 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have several clients with whom we have used it. We have it in production for both the front and back ends of our implementation. We have it running to serve a web app that is used as a call taking management system. We have it running to serve an application that is used for inventory management, tracking, and purchasing.

Pros

It is straightforward to deploy an application from the command line.
It is straightforward via YAML files to change the specification of what you are deploying.
Increasing the nodes supporting your app is easy.

Cons

Autoscaling is a HUGE pain and not easy.
The reliability is horrible.
The connection between other IBM services works, but is not very good eg. Cloud object store, cloud functions, etc.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is appropriate if you are deploying a very lightweight app. It is appropriate if your application is not going to be used in production. It is horrible if you are going to deploy any type of UI that has any level of complexity. Not appropriate for complex processes. Not appropriate for high CPU operations.

Verified User

Consultant in Professional Services (Computer Software company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

2 years of experience

Cloud Foundry allows you to save time and simplify your deployments

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 27, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cloud Foundry to simply to manage our applications. Using Cloud Foundry allows us to deploy quickly and easily with no hassles. It is simple to manage multiple environments such as staging and production. Thus we are able to focus on development rather than managing deployments. Moreover, Cloud Foundry provides a good performance.

Pros

Quick setup
Easy to manage
Supports many languages

Cons

Better scalability options
More flexibility to set resources such as ram and CPU
Improve environment variables management

Likelihood to Recommend

Cloud Foundry is well suited for a web application using a monolithic architecture. It works well with a dockerized application as well.

However, Cloud Foundry is not well suited for microservices architecture applications. The pricing model of Cloud Foundry is not thought with microservices in mind.

Kim Desrosiers

Full-stack Developer in Information Technology at WikiNet (Computer Software, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Decreased time to market leading to more innovation, faster

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

February 15, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We’re using these services as a POC to research the validity of our assumptions - as a way to shorten the development cycle. The freedom of turning services on and off is valuable.

Pros

Enabling new services and the management of those services without involving another group.
A wide variety of access to APIs and services
It simplifies our internal documentation by reducing the number of steps that need to be taken.

Cons

I’d love to see labels when marketing-names are used; for example, Cloudant is tough when I’m not aware what that brand is, but need to create a new database.
Ability to copy projects, services, data, databases between domains - so a user of the IBM cloud with a partner of ours could build and test something, and then move it over to our account when it’s ready. Maybe that already exists.
Easier access to third party APIs; perhaps a catalog of solutions from other vendors / a marketplace.

Likelihood to Recommend

If the majority of connections from your applications are IBM partners, using the Cloud Foundry will accelerate your development and deployment.

Scott Galvin

Senior Manager in Information Technology at CenturyLink (Telecommunications, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

ia for AI

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 14, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have built our own platform on Cloud Foundry and are using it heavily for internal and external customers. We have built a service management platform and provide all services on this platform. We also use Watson capabilities on IBM Cloud and build our own chat platform for internal and external customers. This is a great platform.

Pros

Using for service management
For chatbot
For building our own applications

Cons

Enterprise service authentication
Scalability
Resiliency

Likelihood to Recommend

It is very well suited to create our own platform to provide services to customers, as it is available to multiple locations and provides you with the option to use a lot of API from the catalog which can be consumed seamlessly. I have also seen it better than any other cloud in the market.

Rajneesh Sehgal

Deputy General Manager in Information Technology at HCL America Inc (Information Services, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Easy move to the cloud

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Cloud Foundry is the main repository of APIs for our organization. We are migrating some we have internally already developed in loopback and developing from scratch, and some others in other frameworks. For those already in loopback, we just check that we are taking advantage of all the new features in the cloud. For the rest, we started with a new basic ground API and start reusing most of it.
With this approach, we are increasing the API response time and availability and getting rid of local hardware.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you want to start moving your apps to the Cloud, this is a good place to start because all services required for an app have an allowance level so you can try your solution and take it back if you don't like it. Considering a database and the app in IBM Cloud Foundry (CF), you have the option to improve your app with authentication services, monitoring, and some automation. And because CF supports most popular dev environments, there is a good chance that your app is able to be moved to the cloud.

victor pease solano

General Manager in Engineering at Supermio (Computer Software, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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Bluemix, promising for a small startup but a let down after further research.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 19, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were part of the IBM Global Entrepreneur program and were given the opportunity to use Bluemix or SoftLayer. We made an attempt to use Bluemix for a few small applications when were were dabbling with rebuilding the platform Meteor. If it worked out it would have been the main platform for the production distribution of the web application.

Pros

Bluemix makes it really easy to deploy new applications; they give you a good starting point and try to walk you through the process until its time to write or deploy your code.
They also offer basically everything you could need for your infrastructure in one spot, which is super valuable. This was an attractive option for us.
They support all of the most popular languages and frameworks, JS, Ruby, etc... and have a lot of boilerplate apps to get you started.
It significantly reduces the amount of DevOps work.

Cons

When we used it, it was super buggy which didn't instill very much confidence in the platform.
It seems kind of 'black boxy' like we didn't feel like we had much control over the system, so we were always kind of skeptical of the magic going on behind the scenes and how secure it was.
There is not very much interfacing outside of the IBM ecosystem. We we felt pressured to use their version control management and the task management tools Bluemix provided when we were experimenting with it.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would definitely recommend it for prototypes and, if it seems to work well, maybe in some working environments and production. When I was using it I definitely only would have recommended it for raid prototyping.

Brett Bloethner

Co-Founder & Front-End Engineer at Yipee.io (Computer Software, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

A review from a "not-so-technical" perspective

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 15, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

While I am sure there are other orgs/teams within the company that use Bluemix, I am unfamiliar with anybody else's usage outside that of my groups. We use Bluemix for several things, but our main use thus far has been for the Conversation Service. We use this service for the dialog design of our Virtual Agent. Additionally, we are using WKS (which I hear is now no longer a part of bluemix?) for a content annotation project with the end-goal of creating somewhat of a semantic network for our content library. The broader goal here is to improve our content's findability and relevance, so after WKS we will begin piloting WDS as a content retrieval service. That being said, our primary use-case is by far the Conversation Service for dialog design.

Pros

Intuitive user interface makes it easy for anyone to use, regardless of their professional background.
A lot of the services integrate well with external platforms, APIs, and programs, not just IBM services. A lot of the competitors in this space lack this ability.
Maybe it is just our contract in particular, but support and help is always made available.

Cons

Need: VISUALIZATION CAPABILITIES! Particularly with the Conversation Service.
Need: Annotation capabilities for dialog nodes in Conversation Service.
Need: Search/querying capabilities in Conversation Service
Need: Clearer documentation of the S2T service. I had to use a third party website for an understanding of how to use this.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well Suited:
- Development of information architecture/library. It enables better classification/taxonomy, leading to more intuitive findability.
- Dialog design and content retrieval for virtual agents. (e.g. a virtual agent whose content offerings are not hard-coded into the response fields, but instead require crawling/drawing from other pages/libraries)
Not Well Suited:
- Annotation/labeling/clustering of information that will be retrieved using a different search/query service.

River Hain

Solution Analyst — Machine Assisted Service Enagagement at Autodesk (Computer Software, 5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

BlueMix-a-lot

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

July 24, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

For the past year I've run a personal website on auto-pilot that runs a few thousand API calls per month against IBM Watson Alchemy APIs. Hourly, I fetch articles from HackerNews, and feed the subject line to Watson API so it will auto-categorize them for me. Users of my website are then able to browse articles that are more relevant to their interests.

Pros

IBM Bluemix provides a wealth of powerful APIs. The ones I tried were easy to use and required minimal training to get up to speed.
I'd rate the documentation 9/10 as it was easy to navigate, had good examples and explained most of the possible inputs/outputs.

Cons

The IBM Bluemix interface itself was horrendous. Performance is a feature, especially for a platform as pricey as Bluemix. Please cure the sluggishness so it's actually useable.
Billing details could be improved so it's easier to figure out how much I'm paying and why.
Worst customer support I've ever seen. With multiple tickets, I never heard a response. Despite being a paying customer!

Likelihood to Recommend

For low throughput scenarios, you can get really useful data with little effort, especially when building multiple applications. For high throughput use cases, I would suggest redesigning your product to work around the really high price point of IBM Watson. Under no circumstances would I recommend IBM Bluemix as a hosting provider in contrast to AWS or Azure.

Verified User

Program Manager in Corporate (Computer Software company, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

IBM Bluemix Review

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

July 12, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

To my knowledge it is only used in our department, but then again some companies don't share information horizontally well. It's used mainly as a general hosting product.

Pros

Easy to use
Simple UX
Good design

Cons

Expensive

Likelihood to Recommend

It's [well] suited if you want to use cognitive computing services and general computing all from one provider.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience