Item: IBM Cloud Databases
Rating: 10
Author: Dominik Hurnaus

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Databases

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a young startup we wanted to focus on our core product and not be held back by infrastructure management and maintenance. This is why we moved our RabbitMQ and (persistent) Redis clusters to compose.io. We no longer have to provide servers, maintenance, monitoring, etc. for those parts of our infrastructure.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Robust Redis and RabbitMQ clusters with no downtime within the last 18 months.

Cons

With RabbitMQ, putting special policies on specific queues was not possible via the admin interface and required contacting their support (The support guys promptly configured those policies, though).

Return on Investment

We no longer have to maintain, upgrade, or deal with downtime of our own Redis and RabbitMQ clusters. In hindsight it feels strange to have ever had self-hosted clusters for those services (where in our case additional latency of a few milliseconds is acceptable).

Alternatives Considered

MongoDB

We previously hosted our own Redis and RabbitMQ cluster. Before switching to IBM Compose we evaluated Redis Lab, Scalegrid, AWS ElastiCache, CloudAMQP and others. We still host our core database (MongoDB) ourselves.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would definitely recommend using IBM Compose for secondary storage systems or message queues, as the price-performance ratio is unbeatable. We compared quite a few providers and the price-performance ratio with IBM Compose was by far the best.

IBM Cloud Databases Feature Ratings

IBM Cloud Databases New Features

IBM Cloud Databases Support

IBM Cloud Databases Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Support understands my problem Support cares about my success	Slow Initial Response

Feels strange to have ever self-hosted Redis and RabbitMQ