Pivotal Cloud Foundry Reviews

We used the solution to deploy the microservice that we developed that is built on Spring Boot.

Previously, everything was monolithic, sometime around 2014 to 2016. After that, the organization slowly moved to microservice-based architecture.

Cloud Foundry is the brand or container that offers a private cloud mode and can host within the enterprise data center. It helps to push all the new microservices or the migrated monolith to microservice-based design microservices, and the micro front end will be pushed to this PCF-based container.

Also, it can code gateways too. By that, I mean the security gateways. Cloud Foundry supports the config server and the Discovery server, then the router also on the microservice, which is nothing but the API hosting. These are all the use cases in which we mainly use PCF.

It supports CI/CD, and is integrated with the CI/CD very well. The developer doesn't have to know the internal mechanism or the commands to be executed to push the apps into PCF. If they click on the CI/CD tool, that gets deployed to Cloud Foundry. Therefore, it's very well integrated with the CI/CD platforms.

It has consoles where users can log in and see that memory utilization, the current status of microservices, and the log space. They can see when it was last started and how many instances are available for this particular microservices. It gives details about who accessed it last. The console is user-friendly and self-driven. There is self-help, which helps to interpret the technical details, and it is easy to push through the release management tools.

It works seamlessly for all Spring Boot-based and Microsoft products. Whatever library you have, it works seamlessly. Let's say you have a local environment and you have dependencies that get added to Spring Boot; the same can be working in Cloud Foundry as well. There is not much difference between your dev and your container environment.

Now the organization is thinking about moving everything to a public cloud. The private cloud microservice components are not able to move directly to public clouds, including Amazon or Google. It is not fully containerized. Therefore, you have to make more changes in order to move it to a public cloud. That is something that is not straightforward. We'd like it if they made it easier to move to a public cloud in future releases. 

I'd like to see a larger service offering. For example, Amazon offers authentication, contained management, and storage-based services. I still need to explore this solution more, however, if they do not offer as many services, they should work to broaden their offering. 

If you want to use Kafka or anything that's a Q-based mechanism, which should be out of the box, from the PCF itself, it should be so that we don't have to communicate with a different server altogether. I'm not sure if that is feasible with PCF itself.

We've had some challenges with graphic libraries.

I've been using the solution for four years. 

The stability is good. I'd rate it eight out of ten. 

The stability is good, and we don't see any downtime, and we don't see performance issues, or memory leaks.

We can scale horizontally and can easily increase the number of instances. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We have more than 1,000 users on the product currently. Any technical team who deploys apps on the cloud would use it pretty much.

At this time, we have no plans to increase usage as our goal is to move to a public cloud. 

Technical support is good. They have a dedicated team and a call center that's always available. I've never had issues reaching people. We're mostly satisfied with the level of support. 

Positive

I have previous experience with an in-house private cloud. 

The initial setup isn't too bad. I'd rate the product seven out of ten. 

We found difficulties migrating from PCF1 to PCF2. However, the initial enhancement should be seamless, and it is easy to move the code seamlessly without much effort.

The deployment takes some time. It took three to six months to move everything to a new server.

The initial setup was not that challenging. It is a console-based interface where you can push the apps to deploy and see everything. However, when there is a migration, there is a challenge to move from one version to the upgraded version.

We had a big team involved as it was an effort to keep the data centers up and install the solution. 

There would be maintenance involved since you need to upgrade the latest JDK along with the containers. You do that when the earlier JDK becomes vulnerable to the dependencies. We have an infra team that takes care of maintenance. 

Our organization had to bring in some experts to help with the initial setup. Our team engaged the PCF team and they engaged Dell who managed to take care of the entire data center to bring up the whole operations.

ROI seems to be good. It is helping to be on par with the standards and trends and it is easy to scale, deploy, and quickly roll out. There is also less downtime. So I see so many advantages,

I'm not sure of the cost or how it works. That said, my understanding is it is not too expensive. It would be affordable for an enterprise. 

I do not personally evaluate other options. That is handled by the CTO. 

It's up-to-date, and it is a private cloud within the enterprise. It is hosted internally.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten based on the challenges we had surrounding migration. 

If a potential new user is new to the cloud and if they want to do an internal private cloud setup that is easy to deploy and push, I would recommend the new PCF.