Cloud Elements Review
January 12, 2018
Cloud Elements Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cloud Elements
We had an existing system that relied on using a limited selection of 3rd party Cloud Storage Providers, with plans on making our usage of cloud storage much more tightly integrated with our system and make it look more as part of the system and not some weak tack on. We also had desires of providing our own cloud storage as an option, likely on AWS S3. Our first task was to make sure we supported the existing list of Cloud Storage providers so we looked in to their APIs and it didn't take long to realize that although very similar in functionality we would need to have implementations for each provider meaning that we had to also support updates and changes to each API as well as implement our future features multiple times. With the addition of our desire to add our own cloud storage option it was quickly adding up in development time and ongoing maintenance time. This was more than we could deal with from such a small team while keeping pace on new features to keep us ahead of competition. Researching if anyone else had commented on the same issue of supporting multiple APIs we came across Cloud Elements who offered a Unified API solution. They had a Cloud Storage offering that allows you to develop against a single API provided by Cloud Elements while they take care of the various differences with the Cloud Storage Providers API. On top of covering off all the Storage Providers we were after they were also working on AWS S3 integration.
Pros
- The biggest pro is of course the unified APIs they provide. Developing against a single API and being able to say your product can support multiple providers all with one piece of development was fantastic.
- Their Integration support was great. We had weekly phone meetings to follow up on our progress and offer help on issues. This was all offered free, how good is that.
- Any features we requested were looked in to and prompt feedback on if/when they could be scheduled in were provided.
- Any updates to the endpoint APIs were taken care of by Cloud Elements meaning we could either just get on with things.
- Supporting new endpoints required no work. As Cloud Elements added more supported Storage Providers we could simply add them to our list of supported Storage Providers.
Cons
- There weren't really many cons to our experience. The only slight downside was the cost but they worked with us on that to make it work.
- Greatly reduced development and testing time for our project.
- Allowed us the ability to offer more integrations than we could have done without the Unified API.
- Will reduce our support needs as we only need to integrate with one API and Cloud Elements will be the ones responsible for the maintenance needs of integrating with the Cloud Storage providers.
At the time we found Cloud Elements we found no other option that had a Unified API for cloud storage providers.
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