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.
At my work place, most of the in house web solutions and client projects we built is being hosted on IBM Cloud Foundry. Its being used majorly by Engineering team which I co-managed for the firm, and I also assist in tutoring new developer on how to make use of IBM Cloud foundry and other IBM Paas or resources that will make use by the Engineering team. It provide us flexibility in hosting, which there is option for continuous delivery which can be make use when you setup continuous delivery toolchain, which I have make use when I am given role to set up the environment for a new project and a starter content for the project. Secondly, make use of terminal command to push project to IBM Cloud foundry, which I can configure the custom domain which I want to assign to particular project through my terminal. Thirdly, I can allocate max memory which my application should make use of especially when we implement Proof of Concept to pitch our idea, so i reduce it from the default 256mb to 64mb which helps to save cost and waste of cloud resources, which other applications can make use of. Fourthly, there is provision for secure and non secure subdomain url for hosted application which is very good startup at-least when sharing our POC link, investor won't be worried since we would be providing with secure url to access our ideas which in return make them trust us and give us audience.
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
Likelihood to Recommend
Based on the application I have hosted on the IBM Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service, since I have being using it. It best use case for hosting is NodeJS applications, single page applications for professionals like MERN stack Developer, MEAN Stack Developer, JAMStack Developer, PERN Stack Developer. I am learning Flask Framework now, I will write review on that when I host it on IBM Cloud Foundry.
It is currently used across the whole organization.
Pros
Buildpacks
Easy to Manage
Security
Reliability
Availability
Services
Cons
User Dashboard
Provide easy migration from on-prem/dedicated/other clouds to CFEE
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM Cloud Foundry is easy to use and manage. The application can be deployed on to different versions of buildpacks and managed through one dashboard. The services and features that are provided, is everything an enterprise needs. Security is also built into the provisioned services and IBM provides excellent support.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Hospital & Health Care company, 10,001+ employees)
We use IBM Cloud Foundry to deploy multiple micro services which are a part of our product offering. It the the main deployment model we use right now across our organization.
Pros
Simple deployment model
Multiple language support
Good monitoring and operational support
Cons
Better security model, the current model is coarse grained.
Likelihood to Recommend
Quick turnaround for deploying applications, it provides a language/runtime agnostic environment to deploy applications with a simple interface.
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.
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.
We were using container services from Bluemix - CloudFoundry PaaS to manage our applications. Apps were Java wars wrapped in Docker containers. Also Softlayer VPS's were used to provide for our Cassandra cluster, where we installed and managed Cassandra instances manually. Four VPS nodes total were in use.
Pros
PaaS
Watson (did not use in prd, just saw good demos)
Bare metal servers
Cons
At the time we used there was no direct Docker offering (had to use containers via CloudFoundry api, which is another layer to learn)
No hosted Cassandra database offering (or similar DB, like Amazon Dynamo)
I was unable to use VPN link with another provider: Both sides had incompatible configurations and it was impossible to instantiate working VPN connection. Support was only able to point that the other party uses settings that are incompatible with IBM.
Likelihood to Recommend
+ General purpose application hosting (especially that uses relational database backend) + Cognitive computing that leverages Watson's capabilities of it's trained models; - Column database support for internet grade apps and data-heavy solutions is missing - is Lambda Computing available on Watson? (not that I am fan of it, but it has been getting some attention)
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.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 11-50 employees)
I'm using Bluemix primarily as a means of centralizing data from multiple IoT devices. It solves the problem of providing a platform by which multiple multiple application components (e.g., database, authentication, etc). can be implemented quickly and with little time and money investment. This is an ideal setup for me because it requires minimal support for the infrastructure needed to host my end application.
Pros
Makes a number of integrated modules available seamlessly (e.g., mobile, database, authentication, etc.
The node js platform for hosting IoT components is extremely easy to use.
The node-red graphical wiring tool is makes it especially easy to integrate 3rd party services.
Excellent customer support.
Cons
More tutorials/education materials for Cloudant would be nice.
More flexible notifications for outages would be helpful.
More integrations to third party services within node-red would be useful.
Likelihood to Recommend
My uses of Bluemix centered around IoT applications. I found the platform powerful and flexible to support my use cases. The node-red graphical "wiring" environment made it especially easy to create custom applications that integrate with third party services. This is especially useful in the growing the IoT field. The other major benefit of the bluemix setup is the ease in which one can integrate IoT services with SaaS options such as the Cloudant database.
VU
Verified User
Director in Engineering (Financial Services company, 10,001+ employees)
IBM Bluemix is being used as my primary cloud computing service, having recently replaced AWS as my preferred service. I work with an IT consulting firm, and specialize in designing IT infrastructure for businesses, usually start-ups. My company has changed over the years as technology changes, originally setting servers up at the clients location, then moving to hosting them myself, and now I utilize cloud services with IBM as my primary source of server environments since software development is the focus of 75% of the start-ups I have been encountering, which is where BlueMix shines. Instead of detailing out how I use these services, I am going to explain the differences between IAAS (AWS/Google/Azure) vs PAAS (BlueMix, Redhat). The main difference is what level of control the system focuses on, when it comes to IAAS, the system is focused on infrastructure, such as building a server with x processors, x amount of ram, a storage system with X Gb of data. PAAS on the other hand, is focused on the whole platform that will run your software rather than just the simulated hardware specifications. AWS (IAAS) lets me build a virtual server with 2 processors, 1 gb of ram, 15 Gb of drive space, and 2 network adapters, which I then need to install an OS on, BlueMix (PAAS) lets me setup a geographically clustered environment that can serve HTML, PHP, and MySQL, while also being able to pull Microsoft SQL, while running a version tracking system, such as GIT. So from the start, I specify what I need my system to do to run my software, rather than what I need my server to have to run my OS, to run my server software that I can add additional functionality to in order to allow my custom software to operate best
Pros
Bluemix is great at providing a custom environment that offers everything I need to develop and run my software, rather than just providing a blank virtual server that I need to configure
Bluemix is very good at getting a "ready to use" environment deployed very quickly
Offers a wide variety of very unique, and cutting edge services. For example, I recently came across a Bluemix service that analyses any documents I want, such as email, and can tell me what emotions I am conveying. Is it a hateful sounding email, or a happy sounding one.
Cons
Documentation is lacking unfortunately, and while the new version of BlueMix is very quick and easy to use, it still requires a heavy development background to get features out of it that would end up rivaling AWS.
Stability isn't where AWS is, and while being a perfect development system, it isn't where you want to run a production site where downtime causes financial losses.
It is very hard to move your app off of BlueMix to another cloud service, as you just can't get the same level of platform customization, and you are going to absolutely be stuck to other PAAS providers.
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM BlueMix is the perfect, and I do mean "PERFECT" environment for any business working with app development, which is becoming a very large industry very quickly, or an IOT (Internet of Things) oriented business. It allows you to very quickly deploy a custom platform to run and develop your software with, rather than quickly deploying a blank server. BlueMix is especially useful in any situation where multiple developers will be working on a development project or where external contractors need to interact with the development process. BlueMix is also invaluable for those who have an existing data source – for example, a company that has a large CRM system that has built up a large customer database and wants to design applications which utilize that data. Since the customization is in the platform, it is not ideal for companies that need to have mobility capabilities to move between different cloud companies, or any company that has software that requires a lot of server hardware or OS customization.
