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.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a microservice architecture for enterprises.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very easy to use compared to other cloud technologies. It has a very good performance.

I have been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for five years.

The stability of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is good, I never had any issues.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is not scalable, infinitely, because when you install it on a set of virtual machines it is very hard to scale. It's easy to scale on an application level, but not it is not similar to if you were using Amazon. Amazon you can scale thousands of applications.

We had one installation of Pivotal Cloud Foundry that had a team of approximately 1,000 using it. Pivotal Cloud Foundry runs hundreds of applications and hundreds of microservices and it is divided into organizations, and sub-organizations.

I have not used technical support.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a platform as a service. If you compare it to other cloud providers, such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, they're providing the full spectrum of infrastructure as a service, specifically focused on a platform as a service. It allows developers to concentrate on development and use only one command CF push and deploy the application on the cloud.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is easy to install. It is relatively easy to install in a data center. We use a BOSH software, which allows us to install the Pivotal Cloud Foundry on multiple systems and virtual machines.

We have a few people who maintain Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Each developer can log in and look at the dashboard and see how many instances are running and they can kill any instance, redeploy, deploy, create organizations, and create spaces in organizations to create a hierarchical division.

You're paying for the number of virtual machines you want to install in the installation.

I have evaluated Kubernetes and it is nice. It's a container orchestration tool. However, it is very hard to manage.

What I saw recently was two big companies, trying to move from the PC to the cloud. They bought Pivotal Cloud Foundry and they are using it on a hybrid cloud. For example, they have two data centers and there are two installations of the Pivotal Cloud Foundry in each data center and they deploy microservices to each data center. They use external Amazon AWS to load balance. However, for some reason, the tendency right now for companies is to move to the Red Hat OpenShift, which is a commercial version of Kubernetes.

I rate Pivotal Cloud Foundry a nine out of ten.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is used as a cloud platform.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry has helped our organization by the way we've set it up, it's easy to sign in, bind services, push services, and create YAML files.

The most valuable features of Pivotal Cloud Foundry are its ease of use and the command line interface has the ability to push instances to the cloud easily. 

Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve the documentation. They are good, but they could improve more. Additionally, it would be beneficial if there were more use case examples.

In a future release, it could be helpful to have a graphical interface rather than only the command line interface.

I have been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for approximately three years.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is stable.

The scalability of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is good.

We have two people using the solution in my company.

I have not used the support from Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

I have previously used Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Heroku.

I would prefer to use Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform rather than Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

The initial setup of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is straightforward.

We had an in-house deployment of Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

This ROI from using Pivotal Cloud Foundry would depend on the organization using it.

There were solutions that were evaluated but the choice of solution to use was the governments that I worked for.

My advice to others is to make sure Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the right solution for them. It could be the case where Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS would be better.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry

I use the Pivotal Cloud Foundry mainly in the financial services space and the solution is used for shifting your on-premise work to the cloud. 

The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is the UI, it is easy to use.

I have been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for approximately one year.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is stable.

The scalability of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is good for our usage. Our workloads were not very intense and were average. We did have multiple applications being used but the transaction volume was not very high.

We have administrator, and development users using the solution. We have 50 to 100 users using it.

The Pivotal Cloud Foundry's initial setup has a learning curve for my team, but it was easy to use.

We outsourced the maintenance of Pivotal Cloud Foundry to a partner.

The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is based on the customer's requirements. However, the price is comparable to other similar solutions.

The price for cloud providers can be a big difference when picking the best provider for Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

My advice to others is they should evaluate Pivotal Cloud Foundry to see if it fits their needs. It's comparable to some of the better-known names. From an acceptance point of view, I think it has lower adoption, but people should explore this further.

I rate Pivotal Cloud Foundry seven out of ten.

Our primary use case for this solution is hosting microservices on the cloud platform and connecting it to the UCD to perform deployments in the CMP portals.

We find its stability and scalability valuable.

An easier way to switch between data centres can be included in the next release. We have no active-active scenario, but at some endpoints, we have to shut down first and then only run the application on BCP. In that situation, we see a switch available, but it is a little tricky for new members. Additionally, there are no synthetic application monitoring and real-time monitoring features and they should be included.

We have been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for approximately two years.

The solution is stable. We have not experienced any infrastructure issues, so it is very good and captures a few metrics, onboarding to App Dynamics. From App Dynamics, we were able to create some meaningful dashboards.

The solution is scalable, but we have challenges switching between data centres. Currently, over 500 users are utilizing the solution.

We do not have experience with customer service and support.

The initial setup is straightforward, and it provided a good integration with Venafi. I rate it eight out of ten.

We are using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for a banking solution.

The most valuable feature of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is auto-healing and the plenty of other features that are provided.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve on the technology it is a bit complex.

I have been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for approximately two years.

The stability of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is good.

Our entire team is using Pivotal Cloud Foundry which is part of EMC.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is scalable.

The support from Pivotal Cloud Foundry is good, they are responsive.

The initial setup of Pivotal Cloud Foundry is complicated. However, we made it easy by automating it. It took us approximately one week to complete.

The price of Pivotal Cloud Foundry could improve. However, in this category of solutions, they are all expensive.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a good solution and if their budget allows it, they should use it.

I rate Pivotal Cloud Foundry an eight out of ten.