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 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
As it is an open-source platform as a service, it is very easy to operate, scale, and deploy regardless of what programming language and framework it's written in. However, it could be improved in terms of scalability. There should be proper documentation for easier and clearer understanding to make the process smooth.
We have been using IBM Cloud Foundry for deploying with some easy few clicks and securing, high scalability web application using simple web console method. Our web app required CD/CI integration, so IBM Cloud Foundry helped us to have user-friendly PaaS. It helped us to manage our staging and production process, this helped us to focus more towards development instead of managing deployments. Overall IBM Cloud Foundryhelped us to improve the performance of Web application.
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
Likelihood to Recommend
When a company has a small app with lightweight packages, IBM Cloud Foundry is the best option for working ahead. For large packages or heavy applications, IBM Cloud Foundry generally gives throws StagingError or Timeout errors. It is very easy to learn all functionalities simultaneously with documentation. Blue-green deployment is a better option for the apps in IBM Cloud Foundry for avoiding prod downtime, but the routes can be still ghosting around, and only staging(timeout) fixed the routes.
Cloud Foundry is used for a few of the apps in our projects. Since this is in the cloud, it's reduced the overhead of maintaining a server dedicated for all our server requests.
Pros
Scales well.
Good for deploying small apps.
A variety of commands to choose from to maintain the app well.
Provides clear separation of organizations and spaces.
Cons
It frequently fails when trying to deploy larger applications that involve Meteor.
Mapping and unmapping require a restage, which loses the point of blue-green deployment.
Needs better documentation for all the functionality.
Likelihood to Recommend
When you have a small app with lightweight packages, IBM Cloud Foundry works really well. It gets funky when meteor-like apps are highly dependent on large packages and it constantly throws StagingError or Timeout errors. It is easy to understand but some functionalities are more complex when used. We used blue-green deployment for the apps to avoid prod downtime, but the routes were still ghosting around, and only staging(timeout) fixed the routes.
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.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Professional Services (Computer Software company, 51-200 employees)
Visual recognition demonstration for our customers. We used it for this single demonstration, which took only about a week to 10 days, and the results were presented to several levels or management and we well as 3 levels of customer management with VERY positive response. We trained the the Watson visual recognition tool with 1250 'positive' images of five different objects (250 training images for each object), along with 125 negative images (25 negative images for each object). Then we tested the visual recognition software with pictures of the same type of objects (but using none of the training images) to see how well, and how fast it performed. The positive hit rate was very good (typically 70% or better) with images of the same object, and the rejection rate was typically very good as well (again, better than 70% when the trained object was not in the image). It also did very well when we combined 2-3 objects in the same image. The really surprising thing was that the images could be screen shots (not terribly surprising perhaps), but we could also take a picture of the screen shot with a cell phone and use that--with almost identical results. (When these images were blown up they were quite grainy, so that's why we were surprised.)
However, the problems we encountered with billing, technical support (or total lack thereof), quickly demonstrated that this service was not something we could use for serious work or production.
Pros
Visual recognition. We put together a number of very effective demonstrations, over a short period (7-10 days) to show our management team as well as customers how it would be done, how the Bluemix applications could be integrated with other services (eg. Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft's OneDrive) to create one very capable, automated, integrated application that could solve one of our customer's knotty problems.
The visual recognition application was the only thing we tried during this 7-10 days period. Significant issues with technical and account support (there was absolutely none in any time of what would be considered a 'timely' manner, led us to realize that it was not a service we could use for production, and we therefore did not continue to try out other services.
Although we didn't get to the point of using several services, the services for storage and visual recognition, as well as those for integrating with other cloud provider services (e.g., AWS) were smooth and effortless.
Cons
ALMOST EVERYTHING. Account support was virtually non-existent. We had set up a trial account on the basis of how many training images we could use (they advertised that it was something like 100 per day--but it turned out that the actual number was for the entire trial period. Thus, we almost immediately ran into our limit and could not proceed. We set up a second trial account, but couldn't get that one to work at all (with no meaningful error messages to why it wasn't working). Finally in desperation, we set up a third account tied to a personal credit card. (It was the weekend and we had to have a demonstration ready for Monday afternoon.) That third account, although setup, also would not work. (Some of the problems could have been the result of not having three separate, easily available emails, phone numbers, and billing addresses to use in setting up the accounts, which certainly exacerbated the issues.) On Monday morning we were finally able to reach someone that helped get the 'billed' account turned up--but even they admitted they could not figure out why it had not worked on Sunday.
Over the period of about three days we made multiple attempts to reach both technical and account support. Generally the wait was something close to 24 hours, far, far beyond what we would be able to use in a production environment.
Technical support was generally quite a bit more helpful that the account support team. The technical folks were able to get 'stuck' and non-working account working again, but the account support team was completely unable to provide any billing information. This included how much had been billed to the 'personal' credit card (the one we had to use because it was setup during the weekend when our own internal finance folks couldn't provide a company credit card), and they were completely unable to provide an actual statement, either then or for months later.
One thing of particular note--the 'on-line help' feature for account services was extremely disappointing. There was absolutely no way to get any kind of billing or accounting information using the on-line services. You would think that you could, but you simply can not!
We were finally able to get an accounting almost 6 months later and ONLY because it had gone to some form of 'collection' department within IBM and they were trying to get the final $24 paid. (The biggest part of the amount due from the demonstration period, which was about 7-10 days and had amounted to about $350 in charges, at least 10 times what we had expected) had been automatically charged to the 'personal' credit card we used in desperation to get an account set up so we could get a very important demonstration for our out-of-town customers who were expecting a demonstration the following Monday afternoon. However, the billing fell across two accounting months, with only about $24 in the second month, but during that account, the bank had changed their association with MasterCard to Visa and had issued new cards and rejected any automatic billing to the old card. This left a balance of $24 to be paid, which we had no clue of. We noticed that we had only received the one bill, but not the second, but again, calls to IBM were either not returned or the people we reached told us they could not find out how much was still owed or how we could pay the balance by phone. Finally, almost 6 months after our demo, we received an email from their 'collections' department. We told them that we were not going to provide every 1 cent of funds UNTIL they provided us with an accounting of the services used, etc. That took a few days and we were finally able to get the $24 resolved.
We explained most of this to at least five different technical/account support people along the way. At NO time, did ANY IBM representative ever offer ANY kind of 'consideration' for the trouble we had had, even after learning that the company was unable to reimburse us for 'personal' expenses BECAUSE we could not receive a standard billing statement.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited to a number of applications we are pursuing, BUT, with the difficulties we encountered setting up accounts, getting billing information, fraudulent practices, NO attempt to resolve complaints, months to get bills and sort out payments, there is NO WAY ON THIS EARTH that I would ever, ever recommend using Bluemix to our customers. By the way, the ONE demo I was able to put together, at GREAT PERSONAL EXPENSE, over $350 (which due to your awful customer service resulting in me NOT being able to be reimbursed by management or the customer) was not only a huge success, but for a couple of weeks the customer asked me to repeat the demo for anyone who visited us. However, I let them know in no uncertain terms, that I could never recommend using Bluemix after my experience, and we would do much better utilizing competing services.
