IKS: Early adopter but needs some polish
November 26, 2019

IKS: Early adopter but needs some polish

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service

I'm currently trialing out IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service as part of my independent testing since our platform uses Kubernetes as our primary deployment method for our PaaS.

Pros

Cons

  • Currently, the pricing for the instances is quite high (30% higher than major vendors), so that needs to be worked on.
  • VM spinup times are slower than most major cloud vendors, if GCP only takes 60 seconds on average, IBM Cloud takes more than 10 minutes. This should be faster and could use more improvement
  • While providing a barebones dashboard for Kubernetes is great, I believe having the IKS service to have its own managed dashboard is better than providing the upstream Kube's dashboard.
  • IKS can provide around 30% savings when it comes to operational costs since Kubernetes is designed to run applications in most machines in the most efficient manner possible.
  • Managed Kubernetes can save a company time by 45% since Managed Kubernetes usually is seamlessly updated, without any interruptions with the workload. IKS fall into this benefit.
  • We heard people had saved in maintenance downtimes when it comes to Kubernetes by a factor of 10 so IKS can contribute to more flexible and distributed services with virtually no downtime.
I don't think we've benefited since the management of the IKS clusters still requires us to be in the Kubernetes dashboard: again, most vendors usually have their own management dashboards, without relying on the upstream dashboard, so this is a kind of a problem when we want to interact via Web UI. This needs to be worked on.
Allowing the use of third-party services is a good thing since most enterprises can mix and match solutions. In our case, we might need app A to interact with the Watson service, that's possible because IKS has integration for it without doing anything, however, there must be quality control when it comes to add-ons since not all of them are beneficial in Kubernetes' scope.
I say IKS still has a more to work, while it benefits in being an early adopter like GKE, most of these services are easier to work on when it comes to web management, something the IKS lacks and needs to improve since its release because of how well-established the management flow works on these platforms.
This is more suited to well-established organizations where they want to go cloud-native. With the advent of the importance of cloud, IKS has a place where existing customers would like to move to a more modernized, distributed platform with the trust and security of IBM along with the option to be deployed to a bare metal instance—currently some vendors lack.

Comments

  • Shannon Cardwell | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Shannon Cardwell
    (Vendor Representative) commented 5 years ago
    Hello, This is Shannon from IBM Cloud, thanking you for your feedback and sharing your experience with IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service. We are glad you've found value in the automated setup and have experienced positive ROI by using Kubernetes. We are sorry to hear the issues you've experienced, but would like to offer helpful information to address each item. Deployment times are longer on IBM Cloud compared to other solutions due to the compute isolation that is unique to IBM and the time required to reach quorum of etcd in an HA master cluster configuration. IKS does provide its own dashboard through logging and monitoring, which you can setup here https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/containers?topic=containers-health. You can also manage cluster lifecycle events through the IBM Cloud console.  We find that most customers prefer native tools, such as the Kube dashboard, as it provides a consistent user experience when operating in a hybrid or multi cloud environment. As we continue to work on the product roadmap for both free and standard versions, your comments are extremely valuable.  Feel free to reach out to our technical team on slack at any time https://cloud.ibm.com/kubernetes/slack.

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