Bluemix, promising for a small startup but a let down after further research.
September 19, 2017
Bluemix, promising for a small startup but a let down after further research.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud PaaS (formerly IBM Bluemix - PaaS)
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.
- Well we didn't end up using it so, in that respect, I would say a negative business impact since we spent time messing with it.
- It did show us some technologies to look for in the future though, so that was positive.
- However, with Bluemix we were able to experiment with new technology which is always good for the engineers in terms of learning new things.
- digital ocean and SoftLayer
We chose to go with more bare metal options since Bluemix didn't really offer these at the time. It was simpler to get up and running with the bare metal service, and we felt that any problems we ran into would be a result of our own incompetence rather than problems with the platform. In fact, we never ran into a single issue we needed to contact support for with DigitalOcean or SoftLayer.