A capable, easy-to-use cloud product
December 15, 2020

A capable, easy-to-use cloud product

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers - VPC

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

We use IBM Cloud [Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)] in our team for dynamically scaling our compute capacity as the application needs it. As our application's demands change significantly on a minute-to-minute basis, we've found it much simpler and cheaper to use IBM Cloud to dynamically provision resources than to reserve the application's maximum needed capacity in our internal IT infrastructure.

Pros

  • Easy and fast provisioning of resources through UI, API and CLI
  • Huge scalability
  • Great customer service

Cons

  • Viewing online invoices and billing data is awful - there are several separate systems that require multiple layers of accounts
  • Not all features are available in all regions, such as single-site resiliency in COS
  • VPC instance disk drives are awkwardly slow. The boot drive is limited to 50MiBs read/write, even though network is 2GiBs.
  • Our dynamically-launched instances start faster than they did on AWS
  • The connection to Cloud Functions has allowed us to get massive speed up by parallelizing IO- and CPU-intensive tasks
  • Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
We chose IBM Cloud [Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)] because of its tight integration with the Lithops library, which allows us to quickly scale our compute resources by provisioning VPC instances or calling Cloud Functions, handling all the deployment, data moving, etc. without us needing to know the details or learn another language, all from Python code.
To be honest, the [IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)] experience is pretty similar to AWS. The main advantage with IBM VPC is that it has a very substantial promotional offer of free compute time for first-time customers. The main times you wouldn't want to use IBM VPC are when you have very specific instance requirements (GPUs, etc.), or are able to take advantage of AWS's spot instances.

IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers Feature Ratings

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
7.3
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime
Not Rated
Dynamic scaling
9
Elastic load balancing
Not Rated
Pre-configured templates
5
Monitoring tools
5
Pre-defined machine images
9
Operating system support
8
Security controls
8

IBM Cloud Support and Implementation

It was generally pretty easy to configure things for a PoC through the web interface. Later I moved to managing it through the CLI and making the application automatically manage it through the API, and everything went smoothly. The only downside was a lack of customization in some instance details, e.g. the boot disk size and speed aren't changeable, and some datacenters inexplicably won't allow you to create instances through the web interface.

Comments

More Reviews of IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

  1. Home
  2. Infrastructure-as-a-Service Solutions
  3. IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers Reviews
  4. User Review of IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers