IBM Compose managed DBs - cost effective solution
Updated January 19, 2018

IBM Compose managed DBs - cost effective solution

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Compose

Our company operates with the Industrial IoT, we deliver a turnkey solution for connected vehicles to our clients which are operating within the automotive ecosystem - like repair shops, insurance companies, fleet owners etc. We use different products from the IBM Compose range as listed:
  • IBM Compose RabbitMQ as a backbone for message exchange of our micro-services.
  • IBM Compose for Mongo DB - we use using hosted Mongo database for storing entities like users, tokens, sessions, etc. We use it because of the flexibility for future modification and ease of use.
  • IBM Compose for Scylla - We store data coming from the vehicles. - Just recently - Redis - for caching in our API products.
  • You can be up and running within minutes.
  • Being a managed database, things like backups, recovering, etc. So we dont have to spend much resources on securing those.
  • Proactive support
  • Smaller staring tier for Scylla DB, that will allow smaller companies like ours to on-board easily.
  • Positive - we went from idea to market within a 6 month period, partly because we leveraged managed storage solutions like IBM compose
Being part of IBM Global Entrepreneur program, it was the obvious choice.
Every organization that doesn't want to invest time and money in database infrastructure or setting one up themselves.

IBM Cloud Databases Feature Ratings

Automatic software patching
5
Database scalability
8
Automated backups
10
Monitoring and metrics
5

Using IBM Compose

3 - Software developer, software development interns, CTO
Since compose is managed storage solution and the support offered is great, software developers are sufficiently proficient to explain the issues and get them resolved using the help of the IBM compose support
  • IoT data storage - Scylla
  • Administration database - Mongo
  • Cache - Redis
  • Developed our own caching solution
  • We would use Redis database as a way for storing real time device data and displaying it to the users.
I am very fond of the features and reliability of the compose DaaS, however I could switch if I find same qualities for lower price.

Evaluating IBM Compose and Competitors

Yes - We previously utilized mLAB mongo database solution for storing entity data and also datapoints from our fleet of devices, that was replaced by the IBM Compose for Mongo and we switched to scylla for our device data.
  • Price
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Analyst Reports
  • Third-party Reviews
We got access to IBM compose as part of IBM GE program, that allowed us to utilize IBM Compose DaaS for free, that played a significant role in decision process to switch.
For a small starting company like ours its extremely important to have a reliably working solution, that also makes economical sense. In that regard, I would not change in our decision process. Reputation and price are on top.

IBM Compose Support

The support is fast, knowledgeable, but I would like to see an addition of how a certain event could have affect my application.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
None
No - The current support is good enough and reponsive.
The time that our RabbitMQ cluster needed to go up in memory:
As engineers we sometimes cut corners to fast troubleshoot a problems. That happened to my team as one of my developers made an extra queue in RabbitMQ and then forgot about it, the queue grew quickly and one of the nodes was running out of memory, hence crashing, the Compose team came in and automatically scaled the MQ for us while notifying us for the problem. At the end they saved the day.

Using IBM Compose

It is great the only things I have stumbled upon is the non standard port 80 they use and sometimes expired SSL certificate.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Deploying DaaS
  • Backups
  • The fact that the administration dashboards for Rabbit MQ for example uses port different than 80, that could be blocked in some organizations.