An Unpaid Promotional Post for IBM Cloud

IBM Cloud is a really great service, yet I’ve never seen anyone use it. At most, maybe some developers who work at IBM. Feeling that it’s a shame, I’m writing this promotional post without getting paid. The advantages of IBM Cloud are as follows.

Advantages

1. Free
   • Unlike other clouds, it doesn’t lure you in with sign-up credits. There’s simply a free usage plan called the lite plan.
   • Even though it’s free, it’s by no means slow. Quite usable.
2. Convenient
   • It uses Cloud Foundry’s CLI.
   • Thanks to that, the CLI tool is very easy and powerful to use.
   • It’s far easier to use than the CLI tools from Company A, Company M, or Company N.
   • Just type the cf push command and your app gets deployed (!).
   • If you want to learn more about how convenient it is, check out the posts I’ve written.
     • Deploying a Telegram bot built with Node.js on IBM Cloud
     • Deploy python telegram bot on IBM BlueMix
     • Deploy Node.js telegram bot on IBM BlueMix
3. It satisfies the developer hipster vibe. Because nobody else uses it.

But it’s not all upsides. Maybe because it’s a minor cloud service, every now and then something massive goes wrong, and I’ve never heard anything about how they handle it. It seems they probably don’t handle it properly.

The incidents I experienced

1. The account disappeared
   • I had an account running an app (a Telegram chatbot) that I built as a toy project, but at some point I could no longer log in.
   • The login error message said the account was invalid? blocked?
   • I called and emailed IBM asking them to restore my account, but it got escalated to IBM’s U.S. headquarters and after that there was no response.
   • So I abandoned that account. Even now, two years later, that account is still inaccessible.
2. Login outage
   • This happened over a few hours in the afternoon on 2019.06.14, Korean time.
   • I couldn’t log in to IBM Cloud. It wasn’t even a login failure. It was just a response delay that never ended.
   • I wasn’t the only one. A few other people experienced it at the same time as me.
   • If something like this had happened with Company A’s cloud, the world would have been in an uproar. It’s an unfortunate situation for IBM.

Other minor inconveniences I experienced

• Like all cloud services these days, it’s evolving at an incredibly fast pace. It even changes the CLI tool's commands abruptly. Then again, they even changed the name (the old name was Bluemix), so what’s the big deal about changing CLI commands?

Wrapping up

I’ll say it again: IBM Cloud is a truly convenient, free, and great service. Do you really need to run a simple toy project on a paid cloud service? I strongly recommend IBM Cloud.