IBM Public Cloud Reviews

We are using IBM Cloud as our main infrastructure for a SaaS solution my company is commercializing. We developed it for a first customer and now we are reselling it to a lot of customers as a multitenant solution. 

We do all the solution lifecycle.For example, we have mobile apps for condominium owners and another for gatekeepers, a web portal for the administration staff. 

The core of the solution has its backend is on IBM Cloud.

My organization has concentrated in the solution functionality and doesn't care much about the complexity of the infrastructure as it runs on IBM Public Cloud. The customers we are serving don't need to care about investing in infrastructure neither, so deployment of the solution is quicker. 

It's easy to deploy. You trust in the platform. Its reliability is good.

Support is also good. If you have an issue with the infrasutructure, you can chat with someone, they will try to convince you that they will do something. It offers 24/7 chat support. 

The platform has everything that I need - or 99% of the requirements we need. I can find everything on this platform. 

It's easy to set up.

The solution is stable. 

It is a scalable product. You can scale it up and down.

Both scaling and backup is automatic. You can assign your resources for doing development instead of thinking in administering the platform.

While they have about 99% of what we need, the only exception, perhaps, was the push notification feature that was discontinued. They delayed the replacement product. In the meantime, I decided to go to FCM on Google, for doing this part. 

The push notification functionality has ben reintroduced now with the Event Notifications service, I took a quick look at it but it doesn't seem the same . 

There are some things that I haven't investigated because of time, however, I know they have the features.

The support and most communication is only english speaking. With Google, I can receive notes in Spanish, for example. My developers are not well versed in English. Right now, I am the one that does the escalation of problems. For me, it's not a problem, however, my developers don't have direct contact with IBM since they don't speak English. 

IBM is pushing a lot Kubernetes as runtime infrastructure. There is another alternative which is Cloud Foundry, which is much easier than Kubernetes. I had been using it a lot but it is now being deprecated by IBM. The alternative they are suggesting is called Code Engine, however, it's not as mature as the easy Cloud Foundry.

I was using a demo version of MySQL. They announced, very loudly, that they had already a full production MySQL version so I tried to migrate to the full-blown and it didn't have all the features. I found an issue with the new product but they took about three months to resolve it.

The mobile dashboard could be better. They don't have a responsive solution. For example, sometimes I get a note, "Okay. You are above the limit of usage of this service." I would like to go into my cell phone and not have a screen where I see just one-quarter of the screen. Their mobile front end needs improvement. This is something that they lack right now.

I've been working with IBM Cloud for 8 years since Bluemix was announced. At that time I was an software architect in IBM and primarily used it for experimenting. Now I have a startup and am using it fulltime since 3 years. 

The solution was stable.

One time I was not able to enter the system because of a problem. I received once a week a message that there is a severity of one problem with some feature, however, I really haven't noticed. Perhaps, just one time in one year I got affected by one of the problems. Right now, I don't care about having higher availability in my solution.

It is scalable. I don't have a million users, however, I know it's scalable. I use a small percentage of the CPU. It's not that I need to pay a lot for the service. I am using just a micro percentage.

Support was very, very good. We are quite satisfied with the support. The chat support is always available.

Positive

I used standalone server. but it was much simple and safer to run in a cloud environment.

The initial setup is easy. 

If you do everything on a panel, in a dashboard, they have also a command-line interface, however, you don't need it, to begin with. The documentation is in different languages, so other people should understand it. Everything is on the cloud. Basically, you install a command-line interface. It's the only thing you need to install on your machine. There's no problem with the rest.

My project is small. I can say it's one or two administrators that I need for deployment and maintenance. The people that deploy the solution are checking that it's running. A lot of the administration can be automated. 

I constantly are increasing and decreasing the resources. It's auto-scalable. If one day, I have more resources and more people entering, it automatically increases the number of resources available. I pay for what I use.

DigitalOcean is very cheap. Google is in fashion. Everybody wants Azure. I sometimes think, "Should I migrate or not?" Of course, I am not doing it as it takes time. It's time and resources. I don't need to migrate. I don't know if they are cheaper or not, however, i don't care much. I don't think that they will be cheaper. Perhaps one feature is cheaper than the other, however, in the end, you pay for what you use. If you migrate to another one, you pay almost the same. 

The solution updates automatically. On the cloud, you have different products. You have the database, the run-time for the business logic, and so on. Each feature upgrades independently. For example, right now, I need to migrate my database version. For the run-times, the Cloud Foundry run-time that I was using will be deprecated in one year. Therefore, I need also to start migrating to the latest version. 

I am a first-level partner. I am treated as any customer. I was planning to become an ESA (Embedded Software Agreement) Partner. However, I needed to commit some amount of money with this agreement. Right now, my solution is not big enough to commit something. We have a solution that is software a service solution, that uses IBM on the core. Still, we are just start-up so we haven't committed to anything yet.

You have a large number of functions that you need to try and that are available there. I'd advise new users to just look in another platform if you don't find in this catalog. Try everything from the catalog. There are a lot of features, and so on.

When assigning security to each service, for example, it has its own security administration. You need to take care of the priviledges that you give to your people. Some people can define resources, others can't. That happened to me. I had a developer that configured an artificial intelligence service and at the end of the month, I got a big bill as he was using a service that was not free.

One developer developed a program that was using a service in a loop. And for this service came another big bill again. For that reason, I always advise companies to check how people are using the platform. 

You can define alarms. If you're consuming $100, $200, you can get the notice that someone is consuming something. In the cloud, this is the problem. You don't have your machine in your house and if it's full, nothing can get done. The cloud can expand and expand. So take care of what you are spending on the platform.

I'd rate a solution eight out of ten.

Our team creates systems that do analytics for solar parks. We develop a system that creates preemptive alerts to forecast problems before they happen, so we can tell their operations and management teams onsite what to attend to and what to look for before a problem arises. What we do is get all the data into the cloud, and we do our analysis there, then we end up with some alerts and send those alerts back to the team to tell them what to look for. These are our use cases for IBM Public Cloud.

What I like most in IBM Public Cloud is how easy it is to create serverless functions. They are called IBM functions, but in AWS, they are called Lambda functions. Those are pretty standard, and another thing I like the most is that I have fewer restrictions on the amount of data I can transfer across those functions. IBM Public Cloud is way more flexible than AWS.

I also like that IBM Public Cloud is pretty straightforward to integrate. As long as I have all the tools IBM provides you, getting everything up and running is straightforward.

I also find the solution cheap in terms of costs, so that's another thing I like about it.

In general, you have fewer options to configure in IBM Public Cloud than in AWS because Azure is another thing. This is one area for improvement in the solution.

Another area for improvement in IBM Public Cloud is getting up-to-date information on how to set up everything. It's hard to find new documentation, and you'll end up getting it from the web, but once you get it, everything in terms of setting up the solution is pretty straightforward.

What would be nice to see in the next release of IBM Public Cloud is increasing the capability of the serverless functions, for example, having the capability to run more RAM-intensive or more memory-intensive applications from the top. There are still some restrictions, but those are the same restrictions that are almost everywhere in other solutions. Those are pretty standard, but it would be great if there could be an improvement in that area.

We are IBM partners, so we've been using IBM Public Cloud for the last two years, and we're still using it.

IBM Public Cloud is a stable solution. It gives you SLA notifications all the time of what could be done, what is going to happen in the next hour regarding downtime, or anything that affects you. So far, I never noticed any issue, so I'm very happy with the solution.

IBM Public Cloud is a scalable solution, and it's straightforward, especially because we mostly use only serverless solutions.

Because my company is an IBM partner, my team gets special treatment, and the technical support for IBM Public Cloud is pretty good. I wouldn't know how the support would be if you asked people from the outside. I can say it's pretty good, but maybe it's just because of special conditions IBM has with my company.

Setting up IBM Public Cloud is pretty easy, as long as you get up-to-date documentation on how to set it up.

IBM Public Cloud is pretty cheap. They have an ongoing free tier that won't expire, so as long as your solution is small enough, you can have a test set that you can use for demos, which will cost you almost nothing.

My company uses IBM Public Cloud and AWS Cloud, but just for their basic functions, in particular, for some virtual machines and serverless functions.

I'm guessing that what I'm using is the latest version of IBM Public Cloud, not that I have much of a choice because it's the one I get from the cloud directly. If it's not the latest version of the solution, I couldn't tell otherwise.

I'm rating IBM Public Cloud an eight because it's hard to get to the right documentation, and that's the only thing that makes the solution a bit difficult. Once you know IBM Public Cloud, the rating could be a ten, but for someone new to the solution, it's an eight out of ten.

My company is a partner and reseller for IBM, but my company doesn't resell. It just integrates solutions, and IBM provides all the backend tools for the products. 

We deployed two new concepts. We developed a digital lab in IBM Cloud. It's a digital lab for universities and colleges. We also developed another product called Customer Experience Center. 

An advantage of IBM Public Cloud is the bare metal server. We can take the bare metal server. It's not shared with anyone. We can deploy our applications without sharing them with anyone. That is an advantage of IBM Public Cloud.

It pretty much has all the features. There are many applications and features, and because of that, we need to walk through or study all the material and do hands-on. We need clear documentation or support for using IBM Public Cloud. The UI is fine, and everything else in terms of usability and configuring the cloud is also fine. The only thing is that when we're stuck or get an error, we need some technical support. Normally, for any cloud, we get a lot of information on the web, but that is missing in the case of IBM Public Cloud. We need some technical support documents. That is the only thing missing in IBM Public Cloud.

We have been using this cloud solution for about eight months.

This platform is 100% stable. We didn't see even 1% of instability. It's 100% stable.

You can scale it based on the workload. You can implement auto-scaling to scale it up and down. By default, it's there. We tried with our workload. We started with 10 students, and then we dynamically loaded up to 2,200 students. We didn't see any performance issues, and the system was automatically able to handle 2,200 students.

We raise a ticket and then contact the IBM Cloud team and get some support from their technical team. I'd rate their technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

We are a deployment partner for pretty much all hyperscalers. We are in partnership with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Over the last six months, we are putting all of our efforts into IBM Cloud because we feel it's very stable and straightforward. There are no hidden charges.

We have been working with AWS for the last decade. AWS normally starts with very less value, but when you start using the application, at the end of the month, they send a huge bill. With IBM Cloud, there are no hidden charges. If they say $3, you will get the bill for only $3. We have also used Google Cloud and Azure, but we feel that IBM Cloud is the best one.

It was very easy. We've been using this IBM Public Cloud for eight months, and we didn't see any difficulties in setting it up the box or deploying applications.

The deployment process is very straightforward. We are a software solution company, and if we need to provision one box in the bare metal or classic environment or VPC, we can straightforwardly go and get that one. It's very simple to add storage and attach the disk. Everything is pretty straightforward.

We have our public cloud. We have implemented IBM Satellite to have all the IBM features available in-house. We have tried hybrid, in-house, and public cloud setup. 

In terms of maintenance, because of a strong technical and infra background, maintenance is almost nil if you develop or deploy something. There is no need for maintenance.

It pretty much has a standard price. There is no hidden price with IBM Public Cloud.

People think that IBM Cloud is meant for only enterprises, complex workloads, or big manufacturing companies. It's not like that. Even small companies can use IBM Cloud. IBM has a lot of features related to AI, machine learning, big data, blockchain, and OpenShift. They have many products and features which people are not aware of. It's not only meant for big enterprises. Even medium or small companies can use IBM Cloud.

I'd rate this solution a 10 out of 10.

On the IBM Cloud, I mainly use their servers and their load balancer.

The availability is very good.

I've found the stability to be excellent. The performance is good.

The product can scale quite well. 

Technical support is very, very good. They are helpful and responsive.

If they continue to add more additions, I'll be very happy with it. 

The product should offer more computing, similar to Amazon. 

I've been using the solution for about a year now. It hasn't been that long. 

The stability is excellent. It's 200% stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's extremely reliable and the performance is great.

This solution scales very well. If you need to expand it, it's not a problem at all.

Currently, I'm the only one who's personally using it, to provide solutions to my clients.

Technical support has always been excellent. They are helpful and responsive. 've been very satisfied with their level of service. 

I previously used AWS. However, I have little experience with the product. However, I still occasionally use it. 

The solution is purely cloud-based, and, therefore, you don't need to worry about doing any manual or on-site installation process.

If you are an enterprise, or even just one person handling the solution for multiple clients, you will need to get a license. 

That said, you don't have to pay for licenses if you're an individual developer, but if you're handling a little more load, then you need to pay for licenses.

I'm an IBM customer and end-user. I use this product for my clients. 

I'd rate this product at a ten out of ten. I've been extremely satisfied with its capabilities so far. 

I would recommend it to all developers.

There are multiple valuable features.

The documentation could be improved. Many things are available with the solution, but the documentation is not up to par. It will be challenging to implement if you do not have any experience.

We have been using this solution for more than four years.

It is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution. Because it is a cloud and up to the requirements, it can scale up and down. We have more than 18 customers. We have multiple customers because we are also in the IT industry, and our customers use different solutions in the same cloud.

The technical support is okay, and I rate it an eight out of ten.

The initial setup was straightforward and not complex. I rate the complexity a four out of ten.

The licensing is monthly, but I do not have specifics about the cost.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, I would recommend others choose IBM Public Cloud. It's straightforward, has a good environment and is cost-effective. Comparatively, IBM is cheaper than AWS or Azure.