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IBM Cloud Foundry

IBM Cloud Foundry

Overview

What is IBM Cloud Foundry?

IBM Cloud Foundry is an IBM version of the open-source platform designed for building, testing, deploying, and scaling applications. Enterprises can run Cloud Foundry in a public isolated environment, while natively integrating with other IBM Cloud services, such as AI,…

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Recent Reviews

IBM Bluemix Review

8 out of 10
May 14, 2021
Incentivized
We are currently evaluating the Bluemix stack to get more insights and to be able to identify relevant business cases. We are not yet …
Continue reading

Recommended over AWS

10 out of 10
February 18, 2021
Incentivized
Recently I've built and run a web-app (trindfl.com) within IBM Cloud Foundry, which is drafting a tax declaration for interactive brokers …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 11 features
  • Scalability (24)
    8.5
    85%
  • Development environment creation (22)
    7.7
    77%
  • Upgrades and platform fixes (22)
    7.5
    75%
  • Services-enabled integration (23)
    7.5
    75%
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Pricing

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Community Runtimes

$0.07

Cloud
Per GBH

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://console.bluemix.net/docs/billin…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Features

Platform-as-a-Service

Platform as a Service is the set of tools and services designed to make coding and deploying applications much more efficient

7.6
Avg 8.1
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Product Details

What is IBM Cloud Foundry?

IBM Cloud Foundry is an IBM version of the open-source platform designed to make it easier and faster to build, test, deploy, and scale applications. Enterprises can now run Cloud Foundry in a public isolated environment, while natively integrating with other IBM Cloud services, such as AI, Blockchain, IoT, and data tools.

Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment (CFEE) runs on a Kubernetes service, which reduces complexity by giving development teams a comprehensive set of familiar tools under one management umbrella. CFEE allows IT organizations to safeguard their existing investment in Cloud Foundry, while seamlessly bringing in new skill sets that will lead to building apps that provide contemporary customer experiences.

Visit IBM Cloud Foundry's Docs pages for pricing and support information.

IBM Cloud Foundry Features

Platform-as-a-Service Features

  • Supported: Ease of building user interfaces
  • Supported: Scalability
  • Supported: Platform management overhead
  • Supported: Workflow engine capability
  • Supported: Services-enabled integration
  • Supported: Development environment creation
  • Supported: Issue recovery
  • Supported: Upgrades and platform fixes

Additional Features

  • Supported: Ease of use building interfaces
  • Supported: Service enabled integration
  • Supported: Development environment integration

IBM Cloud Foundry Video

Learn more about IBM Cloud Foundry: http://ibm.biz/cloud-foundry Check out this lightboard video with Sai Vennam from IBM Cloud, as he shows you how Cloud Foundry enables you to build, deploy, test and scale applications without having to manually configure and manage your se...
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IBM Cloud Foundry Integrations

IBM Cloud Foundry Competitors

IBM Cloud Foundry Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported Countrieshttps://console.bluemix.net/docs/containers/cs_regions.html#regions-and-zones
Supported LanguagesEnglishEnglish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese/Brazil, Spanish, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional

Frequently Asked Questions

IBM Cloud Foundry is an IBM version of the open-source platform designed for building, testing, deploying, and scaling applications. Enterprises can run Cloud Foundry in a public isolated environment, while natively integrating with other IBM Cloud services, such as AI, Blockchain, and IoT.

Microsoft Azure are common alternatives for IBM Cloud Foundry.

Reviewers rate Scalability and Platform management overhead highest, with a score of 8.5.

The most common users of IBM Cloud Foundry are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(93)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 32)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Amir Yaqoob | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Cloud Foundry is one of the most powerful, highly scalable, and widely used platforms that not only offers IaaS and PaaS cloud services, but also helps us in building new apps or migrating old ones. It helps us in on-prem and off-prem deployments as well as bringing all of these elements together in the cloud for our ease and to help us solve real-world, difficult business challenges on this single platform effectively. IBM Cloud Foundry ensures that the build and deploy elements of coding are meticulously coordinated with any attached services, [ensuring] application iteration is swift, consistent, and dependable.
  • IBM Cloud Foundry is an easy, efficient, and multi-cloud platform to support users in the management, development, and continuous delivery of other applications.
  • Linking a custom domain to an IBM Cloud Foundry-hosted PaaS application is simple.
  • IBM Cloud Foundry offers well-explained and clear picture log errors to help users to figure out what's truly wrong and why the application isn't being pushed to the cloud or isn't working.
  • Its online UI can become unresponsive or hang due to heavy usage, but we always have the CLI as a backup.
  • When attempting to deploy larger Meteor-based applications, it frequently fails.
As it is an open-source platform as a service, it is very easy to operate, scale, and deploy regardless of what programming language and framework it's written in. However, it could be improved in terms of scalability. There should be proper documentation for easier and clearer understanding to make the process smooth.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Cloud Foundry is the primary container deployment technology we utilize for our cloud product offerings. All our cloud applications are deployed and running with it. IBM Cloud Foundry simplifies the processes for our development and operations team, by providing a standardized packaging and deployment methodology, as well as integrating into the overall toolchain, from development to final deployment.
  • Simplicity - the command line tool provided can get you up and running within minutes.
  • Resourceful - IBM Cloud Foundry is built on top of the open source Cloud Foundry technology, so any resources you find online about Cloud Foundry generally can be applied.
  • Feature rich - provides all the necessary features for a cloud based platform, such as auto-scaling, 0 downtime deployment.
  • Documentation - most of the time, you will be referring to the open source Cloud Foundry's documentation instead.
  • Certificate management - this part is custom to IBM Cloud Foundry, and it does not have official APIs for you to manage SSL certificates for the various domains you might have.
IBM Cloud Foundry is a solid service from the IBM Cloud platform. It is easy to learn, and does not usually require you to make drastic changes to your existing applications. It is especially good for new applications that are cloud native, or micro-services, that can be easily updated and deployed. With its blue/green deployment, you can achieve 0 downtime for your customers.
Yatharth Garg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using IBM Cloud Foundry for deploying with some easy few clicks and securing, high scalability web application using simple web console method. Our web app required CD/CI integration, so IBM Cloud Foundry helped us to have user-friendly PaaS. It helped us to manage our staging and production process, this helped us to focus more towards development instead of managing deployments. Overall IBM Cloud Foundryhelped us to improve the performance of Web application.
  • High scalablity
  • Easy integration with few clicks
  • High security provided
  • Free allowance in every 30 days
  • Needs better documentation
  • Better support required
  • Needs to improve on flexibility for setting resources
  • Tough to access third party APIs
When a company has a small app with lightweight packages, IBM Cloud Foundry is the best option for working ahead. For large packages or heavy applications, IBM Cloud Foundry generally gives throws StagingError or Timeout errors. It is very easy to learn all functionalities simultaneously with documentation. Blue-green deployment is a better option for the apps in IBM Cloud Foundry for avoiding prod downtime, but the routes can be still ghosting around, and only staging(timeout) fixed the routes.
May 14, 2021

IBM Bluemix Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently evaluating the Bluemix stack to get more insights and to be able to identify relevant business cases. We are not yet using it as a production system, but only for test purposes. There are a lot of interesting services included, and we are also interested in offering our own services.
  • Bluemix provides a rich bundle of services you can use.
  • Bluemix is now integrated with some infrastructure components.
  • Fast ongoing development for services/offers.
  • Support sometimes does not respond to tickets in an appropriate timeframe (currently waiting over 7 days for a reply). Sales does not respond to emails.
  • The user interface and the integration of SoftLayer is weird, and it's easy to get lost there.
Using existing cognitive services is very easy. Getting things started for a PoC is also easy. More complex scenarios (like offering our own service in the catalog) is hard to achieve. I currently find it difficult to imagine operating a real production system in the cloud.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Cloud Foundry to deploy with a few clicks a secure and scalable web app using a simple web console. Our web app needed to have a CD/CI integration. Cloud Foundry helps us to have user-friendly PaaS.
  • Easy to use
  • Scalable
  • Very easy to add routes
  • Nice UI/UX
  • App logs are sorted by date but in the other direction (old logs are shown first).
  • Not possible to switch off the service automatically.
  • Difficulty in changing web server settings using Buildpaks.
If you are a developer, it is the perfect service to write code without having trouble with the infrastructure settings. If you are an architect, probably you need something with more options to manage.
February 18, 2021

Recommended over AWS

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Recently I've built and run a web-app (trindfl.com) within IBM Cloud Foundry, which is drafting a tax declaration for interactive brokers (IBKR) traders. A user downloads her IBKR yearly activity reports (csv files), and then she uploads them to the web-app (IBM Cloud Foundry). In a few seconds the web-app, first, parses the uploaded reports, second, prepares the tax declaration file (xml), and, last, prepares an explanatory note (xlsx), which shows how IBKR report is aligned with Russian tax law. Brief analysis results are presented to the user so she can make a decision to purchase and download tax declaration and explanatory note files. All the uploaded and created files are deleted after a while.
  • The IBM Cloud CLI software doesn't change my laptop environment (whereas AWS CF Python CLI does).
  • IBM Cloud Foundry allows me to use the most recent versions of Python.
  • IBM Cloud Foundry easily integrates with other IBM services (e.g., DB2 service, object storage, LogDNA).
  • When using IBM Cloud Foundry with LogDNA, I can't filter log events based on their level (i.t. debug, info, error). Thus, LogDNA marks all the web-app log messages as 'OUT,' which is not quite useful for message filtering.
When I started with prototyping five months ago, I tried IBM Cloud Foundry and AWS, but finally I preferred IBM Cloud Foundry for the reasons described bellow.

I needed to draft a system architecture, which includes Python web app, database, object storage, and API integration with external services. IBM Cloud Foundry provides me with enterprise-level production-ready solutions, which I could easily integrate and test my prototype before I made a system selection decision. Thus, I chose IBM Cloud Foundry, object storage, DB2 service, and LogDNA to proceed. In addition, many IBM services provide free trials, so I don't need to pay for testing during the stage of system selection and prototyping.
Alabi Temitope | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At my work place, most of the in house web solutions and client projects we built is being hosted on IBM Cloud Foundry. Its being used majorly by Engineering team which I co-managed for the firm, and I also assist in tutoring new developer on how to make use of IBM Cloud foundry and other IBM Paas or resources that will make use by the Engineering team. It provide us flexibility in hosting, which there is option for continuous delivery which can be make use when you setup continuous delivery toolchain, which I have make use when I am given role to set up the environment for a new project and a starter content for the project. Secondly, make use of terminal command to push project to IBM Cloud foundry, which I can configure the custom domain which I want to assign to particular project through my terminal. Thirdly, I can allocate max memory which my application should make use of especially when we implement Proof of Concept to pitch our idea, so i reduce it from the default 256mb to 64mb which helps to save cost and waste of cloud resources, which other applications can make use of. Fourthly, there is provision for secure and non secure subdomain url for hosted application which is very good startup at-least when sharing our POC link, investor won't be worried since we would be providing with secure url to access our ideas which in return make them trust us and give us audience.
  • Hassle free linking of custom domain to hosted application on IBM Cloud Foundry
  • Flexibility in hosting application on IBM Cloud with easy terminal command availability for all settings which is required to set up IBM Cloud Foundry instance for that project
  • Well detailed explainable log errors to guide the user on what is really wrong , why the application was not push to cloud or not live
  • Properly index error in search engine which often list IBM forums url within the top 5 when you search with keywords from the terminal log errors you copied
  • Availability of IBM Cloud Foundry SDK on major languages with sample implementation code for the selected language
  • Major improvement I think is currently needed is sponsor more seminars in tech related field because I could search and see more content on youtube compare to other IBM resources which I have to rely solely on the IBM documentation to implement it
  • Properly index documentation on search engine optimization on how to point Cloud Foundry Application to a host on another platform
  • Partner with Massive Open Online Courses like udacity to create video content on software development track with free tiers to host on the resources during learning
  • Have issues when the domain doesn't come with ssl certificates and I upload generate Lets encrypt ssl to the custom domain interface after I install it, the domain won't be secure . I will want you to investigate this issue
Based on the application I have hosted on the IBM Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service, since I have being using it. It best use case for hosting is NodeJS applications, single page applications for professionals like MERN stack Developer, MEAN Stack Developer, JAMStack Developer, PERN Stack Developer. I am learning Flask Framework now, I will write review on that when I host it on IBM Cloud Foundry.
March 01, 2020

Cloud Foundry Usage

Peter Nortey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM cloud foundry is used by our IT department to mange and deploy web apps within the cloud. It is simple to manage in our staging and production process, thus we are able to focus more on development rather than managing deployments. Its salability has been able to improve our web performance.
  • Good Scaling
  • Easy to use
  • Variety of Languages
  • Not suitable for deploying large apps
  • The user interface needs improvement
IBM Cloud Foundry is good for the deployment of small applications and scales well, unlike with large apps. It is also challenging to use 3rd party apps on IBM Cloud Foundry.
January 21, 2020

IBM Cloud Foundry Review

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It was used as a development and runtime platform for new applications. We changed the development mode from monolith to microservices. CF supported us in this matter. By using CF it allows us to deploy fast and change the code. Further IBM is perfect to use in combination with other IBM services. All you need is to develop our code, and all other services are available in the IBM cloud.
  • Operations of the platform.
  • Leveraging from other IBM cloud services.
  • Adding external cloud services.
  • UI could be easier to navigate.
The IBM Cloud Foundry platform is the perfect starting point for creating a fast new application that needs to leverage from IBM Cloud Services like Blockchain.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
All the RESTful APIs and SPA applications are deployed to Cloud Foundry. We also use P2P security for the private services which is good and eliminates external security measures. CI/CD is much easier with CLI and infrastructure is of course not a big deal anymore.
  • Routing.
  • Ease of use.
  • IAM security applies to Cloud Foundry.
  • An option to assign a private IP for P2P security so that public routing can be avoided when needed.
Well suited for micro services and web applications.
December 03, 2019

Easy move to the cloud

victor pease solano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Cloud Foundry is the main repository of APIs for our organization. We are migrating some we have internally already developed in loopback and developing from scratch, and some others in other frameworks. For those already in loopback, we just check that we are taking advantage of all the new features in the cloud. For the rest, we started with a new basic ground API and start reusing most of it.
With this approach, we are increasing the API response time and availability and getting rid of local hardware.
  • Easy move from local to the cloud for web apps and APIs.
  • You can run IBM Cloud Foundry locally for testing.
  • There is a free allowance every 30 days.
  • Of course, you can take your apps back or move them to other kinds of hosting.
  • Something like a scripting way to automate start/stop your cells so you can control or divide APIs you just need for a limited time.
  • The pricing calculator is not considering the cost for the whole month.
  • The IBM SDK is now deprecated so that means your actual SDK can be supported. More clarification is required on this.
If you want to start moving your apps to the Cloud, this is a good place to start because all services required for an app have an allowance level so you can try your solution and take it back if you don't like it. Considering a database and the app in IBM Cloud Foundry (CF), you have the option to improve your app with authentication services, monitoring, and some automation. And because CF supports most popular dev environments, there is a good chance that your app is able to be moved to the cloud.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM Cloud Foundry is used on IBM Cloud for applications across the organization.
  • Easy to use
  • Bind services (catalog)
  • Not easily extendable
  • Lacks in observability
Easier to deploy microservice applications. Buildpacks abstract out quite a bit of configuration. Polyglot development. Abstracts out the containers that are built for the runtimes. Difficult for AI/ML type of workloads. Lacks in observability, trying to work out a custom solution for observability. Still evolving for K8s and not sure how to handle K8 workloads.
November 20, 2019

IBM CF way to go!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is currently used across the whole organization.
  • Buildpacks
  • Easy to Manage
  • Security
  • Reliability
  • Availability
  • Services
  • User Dashboard
  • Provide easy migration from on-prem/dedicated/other clouds to CFEE
IBM Cloud Foundry is easy to use and manage. The application can be deployed on to different versions of buildpacks and managed through one dashboard. The services and features that are provided, is everything an enterprise needs. Security is also built into the provisioned services and IBM provides excellent support.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cloud Foundry is used for a few of the apps in our projects. Since this is in the cloud, it's reduced the overhead of maintaining a server dedicated for all our server requests.
  • Scales well.
  • Good for deploying small apps.
  • A variety of commands to choose from to maintain the app well.
  • Provides clear separation of organizations and spaces.
  • It frequently fails when trying to deploy larger applications that involve Meteor.
  • Mapping and unmapping require a restage, which loses the point of blue-green deployment.
  • Needs better documentation for all the functionality.
When you have a small app with lightweight packages, IBM Cloud Foundry works really well. It gets funky when meteor-like apps are highly dependent on large packages and it constantly throws StagingError or Timeout errors. It is easy to understand but some functionalities are more complex when used. We used blue-green deployment for the apps to avoid prod downtime, but the routes were still ghosting around, and only staging(timeout) fixed the routes.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
We have several clients with whom we have used it. We have it in production for both the front and back ends of our implementation. We have it running to serve a web app that is used as a call taking management system. We have it running to serve an application that is used for inventory management, tracking, and purchasing.
  • It is straightforward to deploy an application from the command line.
  • It is straightforward via YAML files to change the specification of what you are deploying.
  • Increasing the nodes supporting your app is easy.
  • Autoscaling is a HUGE pain and not easy.
  • The reliability is horrible.
  • The connection between other IBM services works, but is not very good eg. Cloud object store, cloud functions, etc.
It is appropriate if you are deploying a very lightweight app. It is appropriate if your application is not going to be used in production. It is horrible if you are going to deploy any type of UI that has any level of complexity. Not appropriate for complex processes. Not appropriate for high CPU operations.
Kim Desrosiers | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Cloud Foundry to simply to manage our applications. Using Cloud Foundry allows us to deploy quickly and easily with no hassles. It is simple to manage multiple environments such as staging and production. Thus we are able to focus on development rather than managing deployments. Moreover, Cloud Foundry provides a good performance.
  • Quick setup
  • Easy to manage
  • Supports many languages
  • Better scalability options
  • More flexibility to set resources such as ram and CPU
  • Improve environment variables management
Cloud Foundry is well suited for a web application using a monolithic architecture. It works well with a dockerized application as well.

However, Cloud Foundry is not well suited for microservices architecture applications. The pricing model of Cloud Foundry is not thought with microservices in mind.
February 15, 2019

IBM Cloud Foundry

Deepak Kaul | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use IBM Cloud Foundry to deploy multiple micro services which are a part of our product offering. It the the main deployment model we use right now across our organization.
  • Simple deployment model
  • Multiple language support
  • Good monitoring and operational support
  • Better security model, the current model is coarse grained.
Quick turnaround for deploying applications, it provides a language/runtime agnostic environment to deploy applications with a simple interface.
Scott Galvin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We’re using these services as a POC to research the validity of our assumptions - as a way to shorten the development cycle. The freedom of turning services on and off is valuable.
  • Enabling new services and the management of those services without involving another group.
  • A wide variety of access to APIs and services
  • It simplifies our internal documentation by reducing the number of steps that need to be taken.
  • I’d love to see labels when marketing-names are used; for example, Cloudant is tough when I’m not aware what that brand is, but need to create a new database.
  • Ability to copy projects, services, data, databases between domains - so a user of the IBM cloud with a partner of ours could build and test something, and then move it over to our account when it’s ready. Maybe that already exists.
  • Easier access to third party APIs; perhaps a catalog of solutions from other vendors / a marketplace.
If the majority of connections from your applications are IBM partners, using the Cloud Foundry will accelerate your development and deployment.
February 14, 2019

ia for AI

Rajneesh Sehgal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have built our own platform on Cloud Foundry and are using it heavily for internal and external customers. We have built a service management platform and provide all services on this platform. We also use Watson capabilities on IBM Cloud and build our own chat platform for internal and external customers. This is a great platform.
  • Using for service management
  • For chatbot
  • For building our own applications
  • Enterprise service authentication
  • Scalability
  • Resiliency
It is very well suited to create our own platform to provide services to customers, as it is available to multiple locations and provides you with the option to use a lot of API from the catalog which can be consumed seamlessly. I have also seen it better than any other cloud in the market.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cloud Foundry has been fundamental in our initial cloud solution development, hanging over a Bluemix solution to provide the gateway / sandpit environment for our industry to quickly develop and push proof of concept pieces of work without the fear of having the normal business processes hanging over them and getting in the way with red tape. Although we are now going in the direction of more IBM managed services where the likes of IBM Cloud, IBM Cloud Private and Multicloud Manager link better in those Kubernetes managed solutions, our time using Cloud Foundry is not over by a long shot and can/will seamlessly work with what will become our key tool stack. Both still have their place, with CF being the better option to keep things standardized, ring fenced and easy for the end user to consume, and then the links in to the K8s services allowing for wider customization.
  • Keeps things more standardized, ring fenced and thus easier for the end user to use
  • Open source, allowing for a wide group for education, auto and support
  • Developing at pace to keep up with the ever changing needs of the industry from on / off premise, public and private
  • Wider ability for customization of applications
Tailored to the PaaS solution better than most, but still has full integration to all of the latest and greatest including push/pull from Git, and app deployment for on/off prem, private or public cloud environments.
Brett Bloethner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We were part of the IBM Global Entrepreneur program and were given the opportunity to use Bluemix or SoftLayer. We made an attempt to use Bluemix for a few small applications when were were dabbling with rebuilding the platform Meteor. If it worked out it would have been the main platform for the production distribution of the web application.
  • Bluemix makes it really easy to deploy new applications; they give you a good starting point and try to walk you through the process until its time to write or deploy your code.
  • They also offer basically everything you could need for your infrastructure in one spot, which is super valuable. This was an attractive option for us.
  • They support all of the most popular languages and frameworks, JS, Ruby, etc... and have a lot of boilerplate apps to get you started.
  • It significantly reduces the amount of DevOps work.
  • When we used it, it was super buggy which didn't instill very much confidence in the platform.
  • It seems kind of 'black boxy' like we didn't feel like we had much control over the system, so we were always kind of skeptical of the magic going on behind the scenes and how secure it was.
  • There is not very much interfacing outside of the IBM ecosystem. We we felt pressured to use their version control management and the task management tools Bluemix provided when we were experimenting with it.
I would definitely recommend it for prototypes and, if it seems to work well, maybe in some working environments and production. When I was using it I definitely only would have recommended it for raid prototyping.
River Hain | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
While I am sure there are other orgs/teams within the company that use Bluemix, I am unfamiliar with anybody else's usage outside that of my groups. We use Bluemix for several things, but our main use thus far has been for the Conversation Service. We use this service for the dialog design of our Virtual Agent. Additionally, we are using WKS (which I hear is now no longer a part of bluemix?) for a content annotation project with the end-goal of creating somewhat of a semantic network for our content library. The broader goal here is to improve our content's findability and relevance, so after WKS we will begin piloting WDS as a content retrieval service. That being said, our primary use-case is by far the Conversation Service for dialog design.
  • Intuitive user interface makes it easy for anyone to use, regardless of their professional background.
  • A lot of the services integrate well with external platforms, APIs, and programs, not just IBM services. A lot of the competitors in this space lack this ability.
  • Maybe it is just our contract in particular, but support and help is always made available.
  • Need: VISUALIZATION CAPABILITIES! Particularly with the Conversation Service.
  • Need: Annotation capabilities for dialog nodes in Conversation Service.
  • Need: Search/querying capabilities in Conversation Service
  • Need: Clearer documentation of the S2T service. I had to use a third party website for an understanding of how to use this.
Well Suited:
- Development of information architecture/library. It enables better classification/taxonomy, leading to more intuitive findability.
- Dialog design and content retrieval for virtual agents. (e.g. a virtual agent whose content offerings are not hard-coded into the response fields, but instead require crawling/drawing from other pages/libraries)
Not Well Suited:
- Annotation/labeling/clustering of information that will be retrieved using a different search/query service.
Jason Brower | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
It ran our entire backend functionality. It is used across the entire organization and its impact is seen on every one of our customers. We used it to try to simplify our deployments, as they took a lot of time out of our day.
  • Large collection of tools to integrate with.
  • Growing application support.
  • Bluemix has the ability to scale easily from very small to very large.
  • Applications that were integrated had a feeling like they came from very different companies and organizations.
  • Logins had to be performed often between different services, once a week the applications would change and we had to learn a different way to do the logins.
  • Branding is important, but the names, like "Jazz" would get in the way of what the application did for us. So new developers would have to learn 5-6 new special websites just to do a single deployment. And one or two new changes a month to keep up with it.
It is suited to large businesses with somebody specifically in charge of deployments. He would be a person specifically paid to take care of all the machines through the Bluemix service. It is not a good situation when the teams are small, such as a three-person development team, because there is considerable maintenance that must be taught between them, and this costs a bit of time and hence money in that situation.
July 24, 2017

BlueMix-a-lot

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
For the past year I've run a personal website on auto-pilot that runs a few thousand API calls per month against IBM Watson Alchemy APIs. Hourly, I fetch articles from HackerNews, and feed the subject line to Watson API so it will auto-categorize them for me. Users of my website are then able to browse articles that are more relevant to their interests.
  • IBM Bluemix provides a wealth of powerful APIs. The ones I tried were easy to use and required minimal training to get up to speed.
  • I'd rate the documentation 9/10 as it was easy to navigate, had good examples and explained most of the possible inputs/outputs.
  • The IBM Bluemix interface itself was horrendous. Performance is a feature, especially for a platform as pricey as Bluemix. Please cure the sluggishness so it's actually useable.
  • Billing details could be improved so it's easier to figure out how much I'm paying and why.
  • Worst customer support I've ever seen. With multiple tickets, I never heard a response. Despite being a paying customer!
For low throughput scenarios, you can get really useful data with little effort, especially when building multiple applications. For high throughput use cases, I would suggest redesigning your product to work around the really high price point of IBM Watson. Under no circumstances would I recommend IBM Bluemix as a hosting provider in contrast to AWS or Azure.
Patrick Catanzariti | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I personally build tech demos to showcase emerging tech and try to encourage others to do so. IBM Bluemix was great for me to bring in APIs like The Weather Channel data and text to speech to create a virtual assistant. I wrote about it online to teach others how to do so too.
  • Easy modular access to new functionality like text to speech.
  • Integrates well with NodeRED.
  • Documentation is really hard to search through and follow along with. Needs a lot more examples and guidance.
  • Pricing isn't clear a lot of the time. As a developer trying new stuff, I've been hit with charges and been unsure where the usage came from. Would be good for this to be easier to follow up. Had asked support staff and got no reply.
  • The interface can be overwhleming.
It's well suited to corporate clients who aren't as concerned by the potential fees (as they'd be much higher developing the functionality in house). It's also very handy to have the services delivered by a company that's got the reputation of IBM as it's easier to show that this is trustworthy and will have good uptime...etc.
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