Confidently recommend the use of IBM COS if you are using IBM services.
June 11, 2019
Confidently recommend the use of IBM COS if you are using IBM services.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Object Storage
Out app supports business practices for an entire arm of a company. All files that get parsed also get backed up in COS. Whenever we generate reports for the users, they also get put into COS for safe keeping. When we do DB backups we also dump those in COS as well. Basically it is a huge backup center and place for source documentation.
- The AWS wrapper scripts provide great interoperability cross-cloud.
- It is much faster than the swift storage implementation.
- It is a clean way to store files.
- If they had just used the aws boto_3 as it was and just changed the credentials piece, that would have made it even easier.
- The connection to their services isn't as fast as one would have expected.
- We found issues when pulling lots of files from one IBM service to the other.
- It has made making redundant backups easier
- Cost savings
- Good up-time
We have tried this, but for our use cases the latency was too slow. We also tested this against AWS Athena and found that its runtime was significantly faster on an order of 10 to 100 times faster for the same query. However we decided to put things in the DB that we needed and that worked better.
At the present we have not tested this out however we have found that the network is slow between IBM k8 and COS. We even had to add in a larger disk size to our cluster to handle the files. Instead of pulling from COS. However COS is still the complete source of record.
The storage class tiers for active, cool, cold and dynamic data has not provided the flexibility that our organization needs. Although it can effectively manage costs based on our data access needs, we found the configuration and management to be a bit clumsy and challenging to apply to our architecture. Therefore we are not fully taking advantage of the feature.
We have used AWS s3 excessively and found that it is incredibly reliable. We have found that AWS s3 uptime is better than IBM COS. We have also used Google and enjoyed the products that they have delivered as well. That being said, AWS and IBM have almost essentially the same SDK for storage and that is helpful.