Pivotal Cloud Foundry Reviews

We use it primarily to build microservices.

I find the ease of deployment and management of microservices to be the most valuable features. The platform also has good auto-scaling capabilities.

Something that can be done better is canary deployment. So, right now, we're using blue-green deployment. The support for canary deployment would be nice. 

A few things, such as what OpenShift does better are cluster management. Like, you can manage the entire thing together. 

Currently, it's possible to manage all the clusters, especially when it comes to cluster management using straightforward configuration. As of now, we have to handle each application instance individually, which means servicing them one by one. It would be better if we could perform these actions as a group or in a more streamlined manner.

One more downside is actually the cost of this environment. So, major downside of Pivotal, it's the cost. So, the runtime running costs are very high. Extremely high.

I have been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for about five years. 

The stability is pretty good. 

The only other issue that we foresee is with the GTM router. It is not configured based on application instances but rather on application groups. This means that if I define a group of application instances, such as A and B, and I want to route traffic to A and B based on some specific code, such as 50% of traffic going to group A and the other 50% going to group B, the GTM router will not be able to do that.

Instead, it will route traffic to the two groups in a 50/50 split, regardless of the number of application instances in each group. For example, if one project has 100 application instances and the other project has 10 application instances, the GTM router will still route traffic to the two groups in a 50/50 split. This means that we are not able to fine-tune the routing to specific application groups.

This solution is very scalable. We have been able to scale our applications up and down without any problems.

However, there are some organization-enabled restrictions on scale. It can not infinitely scale; there are some limits defined, but that is not the pivotal issue. It's more often our configuration because we are using a shared space. So, we don't want to blindly use our scale out.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. 

Support is actually provided by Tanzu themselves; VMware. We use the enterprise suite, so VMware provides the support for the enterprise level. So, the support has been fantastic. 

Positive

For the initial setup, we have to follow certain processes, so it's not just the Pivotal issue. The actual cloud's computer probably takes five minutes to maybe ten minutes. But we need to do lots of checks and stuff, so deployment will probably take around four hours.

We did not install the platform ourselves. The infrastructure management is handled by a team within our organization. We are currently using the on-premises version, but we are planning to move to the cloud in the future.

I would say it is around a nine out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. Just short of Oracle. It's sort of Oracle cloud.

One has to understand the scaling requirements for the application before you go to Pivotal. Then, YOU need to look at whether it's going to be on-premise or on AWS. We are PCF on AWS. Ideally, one should go through all the development and everything on AWS because you no longer have to have a set of infrastructure in your data center for it. You just delegate it to AWS PCF. Maybe right up to the user acceptance testing portion. Only production load; maybe you can just put it on-prem stuff. If there are some regulatory reasons and all that. But if you don't have any regulatory requirements, just go for PCF AWS. It would make your infrastructure management much easier.

Overall, I would probably give it; comparing my OpenShift and AWS and all of that, I would probably give Pivotal Cloud Foundry a seven out of ten.  

Since we have just started using the solution, I won't be able to comment on its features. In my current company, we need access to and understand the solution. So, it takes a lot of time.

Improvement-wise, the tool needs to have the capability for more configurations. Pivotal Cloud Foundry does not support the migration process. So, it is also an area for improvement in the solution.

I have been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for two and a half months. Currently, we are using a legacy application. So, while half of the coding is Spring, the other half is shell scripting. So I am in the process of getting the space in the cloud, along with the access. Also, I am a customer and user of the solution.

Until now, I haven't done many things in the solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a three out of ten.

It is a scalable product. I think more than 60 users are using it in my company. We are not facing any particular issues since most of the applications in our company are written in Java and .NET.

We do have architects and experts in our company. So, whenever we face problems, we communicate with them, and they provide suggestions. Also, I return to them if I face issues with the solution.

Presently, we are using AUTOsist.

Regarding the setup phase, every step is a hurdle. With Pivotal Cloud Foundry, I won't get any proper resources for that. Even if I Google it, there is no proper solution for Pivotal Cloud Foundry. However, if we go for Azure or some other cloud, we can get a lot of information. I believe there is not much information for Pivotal Cloud Foundry since it may be some license issue. If you go for Azure, the migration process is straightforward.

Since we have been given 10 GB of space in the public cloud, we are utilizing it in our company. So, we are trying to deploy our application on the cloud, and for us, it is like a trial process for now. From our total application rate, I can say that only two to three percent is on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Currently, half of the code is in the shell script, which is causing issues. Also, most people in my organization have worked on Java-related code. For most of the applications, they are using the same, that is, shell script and AUTOsist, and so we haven't migrated yet. So that is the reason that we are planning to opt for a hybrid model so that we don't have to migrate completely to Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Our company is facing problems when migrating from shell script to Pivotal Cloud Foundry. So, I am stuck with the aforementioned issue. There is new learning in any area where I put my efforts in relation to the solution. However, the exposure till now has been good even though I have faced a lot of challenges.

I suggest others go for Azure or Google Cloud instead of Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

If you are working with a deadline, it is very difficult to work with the solution since you won't get access to proper resources. For Azure and Google Cloud, plenty of different information is available.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry serves as a cloud hosting platform for our company, where all microservices and cloud-related components in our application are deployed. Essentially, it's a hosting cloud platform for us.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a private cloud platform for internal bank transactions, whereas AWS is for external transactions. The bank has set up a private cloud for more security, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry provides a secure option for hosting internal transactions. Unlike other cloud platforms such as Amazon, GCP, or Azure, Pivotal Cloud Foundry is more secure as it is a private cloud platform.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry doesn't have certain advanced features. So, the solution should consider adding more advanced features within the tool.

I have been using Pivotal Cloud Foundry for three years. I am not sure if it is the latest version we use in our company.

The solution is stable and resilient. In our company, we do not even see any challenges with the solution.

The solution is scalable, similar to distributed applications which we are actually moving to the cloud.

It is a hosting platform. After deploying the solution, if we design it properly, the solution can be made scalable.

We contact the technical support team whenever we need to host a new application or perform maintenance work. If we need to increase our storage capacity or encounter any technical issues related to the infrastructure, we contact the tech support team for assistance.

I won't be able to comment on the setup process since I am not a member of the infrastructure team. In our organization, we have deployed Pivotal Cloud Foundry on a private cloud.

We do pay for the licensing cost because we have opted for a private cloud setup. So, it is a cloud setup, and we have to make payments based on the cloud size. I do not consider it very costly when comparing it to the market.

From the evaluation conducted by my company, we found that OpenShift has more features and may consider shifting to it from Pivotal Cloud Foundry. I am not sure about the specific features that OpenShift possesses. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is something that, as a bank, we have been dealing with for five years now.

Our organization has been analyzing OpenShift and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Regarding the comparison, there have been certain use cases, and I may not be the best person to tell you about them right now because my team is actually coming up with those use cases. So they were comparing Pivotal Cloud Foundry against what we are using and what is available in the market in OpenShift.

We have considered Pivotal Cloud Foundry when moving our solutions to the cloud. We also follow the solution's design operational principles.

As a private cloud, I recommend the solution to those planning to use it. We have been using it for quite a long time now, and I can say that it has no such stability-related issues. I rate the overall product a seven out of ten.

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 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

Essentially, the solution provides cloud diagnostic capabilities, making it easier to port applications from one cloud provider to another. Some companies do not wish to build technology that is linked to AWS, Azure, or Google, and instead opt for platforms such as OpenShift.

Most cloud services can deploy the solution, but countries such as Switzerland and Singapore have strict data residency rules. They must ensure that the data they store in the cloud remains within their geographical boundaries. If they cannot get this assurance from the cloud providers, they usually do not move their applications. Therefore, these customers prefer to keep their applications running on their own data centers. Other customers who do not have these constraints can move to any cloud provider of their choice.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is very robust, especially for building Java. The solution is especially strong in Java because later it began to support other technologies, but Java remains its forte and it leverages many frameworks from the Spring Cloud, which is a very robust capability. It is very easy to build applications and they take care of many cross-cutting concerns that any application or platform has. Therefore, developers only need to focus on writing the business services, without worrying about the cross-cutting technical challenges that need to be solved in application development. The solution also has a very robust deployment capability, making deployment quite easy. We can build a service and then push it through with ease. Setting up the Pivotal platform is complex and takes a while, but once it is set up, it becomes much simpler.

There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the future of Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Constantly being adopted by new organizations makes it a risky investment for companies, as there is no guarantee that the solution will still exist in a few years.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for three years.

I give the stability a nine out of ten.

I give the scalability a nine out of ten.

The technical support is not great because of the platform's capability.

Neutral

Typically, the deployment takes less than 30 minutes, especially for the Pivotal platform foundation, as the setup of the platform is quite complex. It is done by the central platform team, who are experts. If there are any issues, they can also quickly resolve them.

The return on investment is greater than the core platform offers because Pivotal has been a key part of the transformation strategy that customers should use when adopting Pivotal Cloud Foundry. In addition to the platform capabilities, the transformation strategy, how to scale teams, how to enable them, and the engineering and transformation approach, Pivotal Cloud Foundry has a strong opinion on these matters. This has helped many customers make big transformations, such as moving from traditional application servers and monolithic architectures to domain development and microservices, as well as DevOps engineering. This has enabled Pivotal Cloud Foundry to offer a meaningful ROI to its customers.

The pricing is on the higher side and there are cheaper options available.

I give the price a five out of ten.

I give the solution a five out of ten.

Some of our customers have moved away from Pivotal Cloud Foundry due to the risk of their apps not existing in a few years' time. Several of our larger customers in the US and Asia Pacific region have shifted to Red Hat OpenShift.

I do not recommend Pivotal Cloud Foundry due to the uncertain nature of its future.

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.

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.

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.