A great start by IBM as they dip their toe into the Cloud marketplace - keep an eye on this one as it develops.
Updated April 08, 2020
A great start by IBM as they dip their toe into the Cloud marketplace - keep an eye on this one as it develops.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Software Version
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers - VPC
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers
IBM VPC is being used currently as a proof of concept and a training platform - our business relies on enabling other companies to achieve their own technology goals, and with cloud migrations currently big business, we make it ours to be aware of the current state of cloud provider offerings. IBM is a vital part of this. Thus through prototyping potential solutions and building on our own cloud platform knowledge, we are in a better position to help clients to make the right purchasing decisions for their business, and to help them to implement it.
- Powerful
- Easy to get started
- Multiple regions
- Clearly a "me too" offering
- Small range of offerings compared to other providers
- Limited range of regions
- It has made us aware of other offerings
- Gives us a wider range of products
- Helps people make value based judgements on cloud provision
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Google Compute Engine, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Azure Virtual Machines
It does a subset of what the bigger players such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google already do - it's clearly being actively developed but currently lags some way behind them in terms of offerings and capabilities. I feel it's worth watching as I'm sure in a years time it will be radically bigger and better featured than it is now.
- IBM Cloud Virtual Servers
This was really an evaluation to see how IBM Cloud works so we can better support our clients - to their credit, the offering works exactly as you would expect it, with the exception that you can't perform custom routing between subnets. If this is an absolute requirement then (at the time of writing) you'll need to go to another cloud provider.
Do you think IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers delivers good value for the price?
No
Are you happy with IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers's feature set?
No
Did IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers again?
No
IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers Feature Ratings
IBM Cloud Support and Implementation
I was very impressed by getting IBM Cloud's VPC offering up and running - I endeavour to do everything through CLI tools where available as this lends itself to future automation, and is easier to document then endless GUI screenshots. I found IBM's documentation easy to navigate (though confess I found all the pieces I needed through Google than via IBM Cloud's own documentation search), and I was able to go from zero knowledge to achieving what I needed within a couple of hours.
Basic (free) - We are a professional services provider and an IBM Partner, so it's important for us to develop our own capability with every technology we resell and offer services around. We enjoy working with IBM, but it is important to us to be able to make a valuable contribution to IBM when we recommend or resell their products to our clients, and so being able to work independently is vital to us. However some account issues mean we did lean on IBM Cloud's free support tier, which was easy to access, responsive, and very effective. Based on this support experience I'd have no problem recommending IBM Cloud support to clients.
Without IBM Cloud's support, we would never even have gotten our proof of concept off the ground as for reasons unknown, our account wouldn't validate (in spite of being populated with all our details correctly). IBM Cloud support responded very rapidly and got us over the hurdle, meaning we were up and running quickly and able to complete our proof of concept within a day.
- Central Documentation and Learning Hub
- IBM Cloud Docs
- Ability to check uptime status for IBM Cloud products
- Access to IBM and Developer communities through Stack Overflow or GitHub
- Chat with Watson
Yes - I wanted to learn how to modify routing tables within VPC's, especially for the purpose of setting up a virtual infrastructure with a "bring your own" firewall on the edge as many customers are now favouring. Sadly at the present time, although you can customise the routing table, editing the default route is not possible. Whilst this meant we were unable to bring in a third party firewall appliance, this limitation was clearly documented meaning that we did not waste time trying to implement something that wasn't going to work. I really appreciate IBM Cloud's level of documentation, and their transparency - this is vital in my opinion and we could have wasted a lot of time if not for this.