CloudBolt Reviews

We use the solution to provide self-service to end users in our virtual environment.

I find the self-service features valuable. In a virtual environment, you don't get that cloud experience. When creating something close to a cloud experience, you need a cloud platform like CloudBolt. Another benefit of using CloudBolt is how it helps with resource control. It helps with resource control, such as with network storage in any infrastructure. Another valuable feature is in the application deployment and customization.

One use case for CloudBold is creating blueprint templates for multiple clouds. Another is cost management or optimization. There is a piece that comes along with CloudBolt called Kumolus, and there is a lot of interest in that side of cost management.

Cost management is a valuable feature, but the solution's biggest advantage is flexibility. There is a standard framework that CloudBolt provides, but if I'm good with Python, I can tweak it and make it better. I can customize it easily.

We used the solution to manage a pretty substantial financial institution’s IaaS infrastructure. We were also using it to manage the infrastructure as a service of a government area. It was pretty good.

The ability to manage most clouds is helpful, especially with extremely large organizations where we have multiple cloud providers, and we cannot centralize management. It was one of the areas that really helped us, especially with managing and mapping resources. We also used CloudBolt to find a shadow IT resource. Nobody knew what they were doing or who was responsible for them.

CloudBolt is very useful for a customer currently using the multi-cloud model, and wants to manage everything on a single console, e.g. GCP, AWS, Azure, or their VMware infrastructure.

There are also multiple things we can do through CloudBolt which are important. One thing we can do is to schedule power on and power shutdown so those processes are automated. I was able to implement it even in the trial version of the platform. They have a free trial for some servers where the license is not required, so I implemented it on my test environment and that worked fine with me.

Another thing we can use CloudBolt for is VM deployment on the cloud. We need to install the Ansible tower and configure it, but through CloudBolt, we can deploy everything on the cloud.

There are two valuable features we like about CloudBolt. First, we can manage multiple clouds and the on-premises infrastructure on CloudBolt.

The second valuable feature is that we can do customization on the platform. For example, during a deployment, there's a default team on CloudBolt, and we have an agreement with them as their partner, that we can customize the logo, the icon, etc. for our customers. We can put the Sopra Steria logo, or we can customize features on CloudBolt, etc.

Our primary use case for this product is for a mixed set of services, including providing IT, multi-cloud management, single pane of glass control panel, providing metering and charge-back capability, role-based access control, and other things. It's a long list. My focus specifically is with regard to the data center and cloud. Enterprise businesses are using this solution. 

We use this solution ourselves as well as for our clients. We're a partner with CloudBolt and I am a solution specialist/product manager of cloud and data center services.

The product takes care of a hybrid cloud environment and it helps me maintain control and insight across various cloud platforms. With regard to the application blueprint, if I'm able to create that using the platform then they are cloud agnostic, so I don't need to create different blueprints for different cloud providers. I just need to create one blueprint and I can select the target cloud myself. 

The flexibility to provide hook points into any step of the provisioning process as well as the ability to customize and extend reporting, dashboards and server tabs to provide additional information to the end user. No other product we've tested has such comprehensive capabilities natively built in. 5 minute upgrades are the norm. Five minor and one major update later the alphas are almost as rock solid as the GA releases.

Update: The flexibility and speed to deliver new features is definitely the best thing about this company.

We were able to collapse over 95% of our orchestration directly into Chef and CloudBolt as opposed to having well over 300+ steps of orchestration in vCO and multiple scripts to call out to other self developed API's to do that same thing. Our delivery of VM's went form 19-23 minutes to 8-13 minutes depending on the cloud. The willingness of the CloudBolt team to improve their product at a very rapid pace has resulted in a delivery of over 130+ RFE's in less than 6 months to enhance the compatibility with company services, functionality and aesthetics.

Update: We are up to over 200 features in the last year and a half.

CloudBolt's simple to understand framework allows current IT resources to easily automate the entire lifecycle of VM using predefined hook points. The way CloudBolt intuitively placed the ability to implement plugins, remote scripts, webhooks, or actions directly within the product is awesome! You can upload, use github (or http link), or just edit the code right inside the GUI. With CloudBolt we could easily modify our code during the evaluation and development phases and see the results in seconds.

The ability of our tier one and two teams to support CloudBolt was >80% on day 3. Tier III and Architects spent up to 40% of the project time supporting our previous cloud management platform; with CloudBolt we were able to reduce product support to less than 3% of work time spent.

Overall, we found the ease of use and flexibility to be most valuable. This is a result of a few decisions by the CloudBolt team.

• Focus: It doesn't attempt to manage all infrastructure and application components, but focuses on providing a superior "portal" that can talk to many clouds and third party products.
• Expandability: The product provides many "hooks" throughout the products, where you can insert remote execution of scripts, REST calls, and even custom scripts written in Python, the same language CloudBolt itself is written in, with full access to the underlying CloudBolt database model to extend the product in a myriad of ways.

We only recently (last 12 months) started to build and automation platform. We focused first on platform automation, as we already had a bevy of Jenkins driven scripts in to deploy our applications.

CloudBolt's ease of use, coupled with our initial focus on fully automating infrastructure deployment, has won accolades from our internal stakeholders. A specific development director for one LOB has been our biggest advocate, lauding his ability to provision and destroy multi-server environments on-demand in step with his application releases.

We also took this opportunity to transition to a full infrastructure-as-code model, implementing Puppet Enterprise at the same time, driving a new level of consistency to those deployed environments.