IBM Cloud Private vs. SUSE Rancher

IBM Cloud Private is an ideal platform for companies to accelerate their business growth. It helps in reducing the cost of IT and operations while delivering a great customer experience. With IBM Cloud Private, you can gain agility and security with a flexible hybrid model that fits your needs. It's highly recommended to my colleagues from me.

Incentivized

SUSE Rancher as a management tool becomes useful on a larger scale. Small deployments not so much. If someone also requires Kubernetes capacity or storage, Rancher is an excellent choice. Also, without Kubernetes' skills, it is unlikely that Rancher deployment is going to be a success. Then again if someone else is managing your Kubernetes capacity, setting up the software's capacity will yield greater control. Rancher is not a very integrated solution similar to others in the market.

Incentivized

• Capacity On Demand to scale up and down environments
• SaaS model allows our team to have less involvement in managing or controlling the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, storage, or even individual application capabilities.
• SaaS model allows our team to worry less about upgrades, fix packs, environment support etc.

Incentivized

• Public and private cloud infrastructure providers based on K8s CAPI
• REST API that can be used to integrate company services with Rancher
• GUI that is easy to learn and use in daily operations
• Builtin GitOps automation solution based on Fleet project
• It is fully open source

• Bluemix/IBM Cloud UI can be better
• Changing Brand name from Bluemix to IBM Cloud, as we are habituated to Bluemix more

Incentivized

• No possibility to snapshot Projects. You can snapshot and restore the whole Kubernetes cluster, but not a Project or Namespace. For this, you have to use external tools.
• You cannot detach the Rancher-created Kubernetes clusters from Rancher management.

The usability and user experience are good in general, although sometimes some errors can cause confusion, especially for those users who are not experts.

Use cases can be complex hence support as well. Problems have been solvable, but not always easily. It's great that there is support!

Incentivized

With VMware cloud, each VMware Cloud customer must have an SDDC account(VMC) as well as a general AWS account. The two accounts must be linked for the service to work which is a tiresome thing to do for some clients but with IBM Cloud Private all these issues are solved.

Incentivized

As we use only AWS EKS Clusters originally we were using the AWS Console and CLI but that is too limited in scope. Also, we were using AWS IAM roles to provide access to users but that was lots of extra work to have them integrated into SSO while on Rancher we have just connected our GitHub login with the Alfresco organization and that uses, in turn, Okta for SSO so provisioning for access is automatic for any developer who has been assigned to GitHub.

Incentivized

The investment for small environments is quite significant. There has to be a compelling case to enhance the areas where SUSE Rancher brings in value to make such a financial leap. There is also a free version to test the value propositions, which will help support the user's buying decisions. More clusters, more volume, more tasks and more complexity in the environment equals more value that Rancher can provide.

Incentivized

• IBM Cloud has helped us start using the cloud and migrating old services to the cloud.

Incentivized

• Shortens "Time-to-Market" factor for new business applications or implementing new functionalities. From 1 to 50 microservices-based business applications in 6 years.
• 24/7 availability, generates more money. There are many infrastructure components that are regularly powered-off for maintenance or upgrade, bur we rarely are turning off our downstream Kubernetes clusters where our business applications lives.
• Single Point of Contact with platform maintenance and development Team, eases implementation of new business applications