Likelihood to Recommend It's well suited if:
The organization has large number of applications that needs to be deployed frequently. The organization is tied to the DevOps mindset. The organization has programs in different languages. The applications does not need EJB's support that servers like web logic provide. It's less suited if:
The applications needs security configuration within the same CloudFoundry instance. The organization, for whatever reason does not want developers to manage the instances. Read full review I would still recommend Google Compute Engine for application build and testing but not for building SaaS. As it'd be more tricky to integrate any third party apps, as Google already provides most of the services but sometime our clients request for such customisations, which is more suited per their internal alignments. Machine Learning is a tool which is more efficient than any other provider and has wide range of languages for processing.
Read full review Pros Support for Orgs and Spaces that allow for managing users and deployables within a large organization. Easy deployment, deploying code is as simple as executing single line from CLI, thanks to build-packs. Solid and rich CLI, that allows for various operations on the instance. Isolated Virtual Machines called Droplets, that provide clean run time environment for the code. This used to be a problem with Weblogic and other application servers, where multiple applications are run on the same cluster and they share resources. SSH capability for the droplet (isolated VM's are called droplets), that allows for real time viewing of the App code while the application is running. Support for multiple languages, thanks to build-packs. Support for horizontal scaling, scaling an instance horizontally is a breeze. Support for configuring environment variable using the service bindings. Supports memory and disk space limit allocation for individual applications. Supports API's as well as workers (processes without endpoints) Supports blue-green deployment with minimal down time Read full review Scaling - whether it's traffic spikes or just steady growth, Google Compute Engine's auto-scaling makes sure we've got the compute power we need without any manual juggling acts Load balancing - Keeping things smooth with that load balancing across multiple VMs, so our users don't have to deal with slow load times or downtime even when things get crazy busy Customizability - Mix and match configs for CPU, RAM, storage and whatnot to suit our specific app needs Read full review Cons Does not support stateful containers and that would be a nice to have. Supports showing logs, but does not persist the logs anywhere. This makes relying on Cloud Foundry's logs very unreliable. The logs have to be persisted using other third party tools like Elk and Kibana. Read full review Built-in monitoring via Stackdriver is quite expensive for what it provides. Initially provided quotas (ie. max compute units one can use) are very low and it took several requests to get an appropriate amount. Support on GCE is limited to their knowledge base and forums. For more hands-on support provided by Google, you must pay for their Premium services. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Overall services are good to go. Received good feedback from users. Have regional server locations. It has free extra service included.
Read full review Usability Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.
Brendon Brown Business IT, Web Development, eCommerce and Digital Marketing
Read full review Support Rating The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product. Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues. Read full review Alternatives Considered While Docker shines in providing support for volumes and stateful instances, Cloud foundry shines in providing support for deploying stateless services.
Heroku shines in integrating with Git and using commits to git as hooks to trigger deployments right from the command line. But it does not provide on-premise solution that Cloud foundry provides.
Read full review I've used the AWS stack, the Azure stack, OCI, and IBM cloud. I have found GCP and AWS the easiest to deploy, configure, manage, and so on. Google has offered me at least 5 free in person classes to train me in new features on the platform. Likewise AWS has offered me probably 10 to 15 guided online tutorials, with a person to field any questions. All of this free training will no doubt affect my experience in a serious way, so keep that in mind as a reader. Outside of ease of use and configuration, I haven't experienced performance problems across any of the cloud services that I have used.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive impact, since it simplifies the deployment time by a huge margin. Without cloud foundry, deploying a code needs coordination with infrastructure teams, while with cloud foundry, its a simple one line command. This reduces the deployment time from at least few hours to few minutes. Faster deployments promote faster dev cycle iterations. Code maintenance such as upgrading a Node or Java version is as simple as updating the build-pack. Without cloud foundry, using web logic, the specific version only supports a specific version of Java. So updating the version involves upgrading the version of web logic that needs to involve few teams. So without cloud foundry, it takes at least few days, with cloud foundry, its a matter of few mins. Overall, happier Developers and thats harder to quantify. Read full review With Google Compute we don't have the overhead of managing our own data centers reducing costs and reducing the staff needed to manage systems. As I said earlier, Google's costs are ~1/2 of AWS, so we are able to see a ROI much faster. Read full review ScreenShots