Bluemix is a pretty good choice for emerging tech tinkering!
July 18, 2017
Bluemix is a pretty good choice for emerging tech tinkering!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Watson Analytics (discontinued)
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.
- The time taken to work out things initially was a bit of a hit as some parts were a bit confusing, however I documented these for future reference and now it's not too time consuming at all to get going.
Bluemix had a much easier route to get into the artificial intelligence side of things with Watson skills. It also seemed a lot more straightforward to use things like the Weather Channel data, sentiment analysis... etc., than the others. I'd also had a bad experience with AWS charging me money for a web app that was under prototype and not being accessed by anyone (so wasn't sure where the usage was coming from). Didn't like AWS not notifying me or anything about taking me off the free plan. IBM seems at least a little more open about their charges.