Google Compute Engine vs. IBM Cloud Bare Metal Servers

It is excellent if you have any workloads that need raw computing or plan to have any state-full services running in your environment like DBs (for which you don't want to use Managed services), cache, etc. It also gives you complete control over which versions of software, OS, etc., you need, and thus, you can build anything and deploy it on GCE.

Incentivized

IBM Cloud Bare Metal servers are best suited if you are looking for an alternative for adding computing resources to your organization's IT domain. The costs of owning and maintaining a physical resource in the organization are far more than renting computing resources on the cloud. The bare-metal servers allow you to utilize the entire server for your organization's requirements.

• A simple web-based interface that is a breeze to train new engineers to use. Our experienced engineers never have trouble finding or doing anything on GCE.
• Sustained use and Committed use discounts mean we get top-tier VMs for an incredibly competitive price.
• Wonderful identity and access management that gives us peace-of-mind when granting access to machines to contractors and other 3rd parties.
• Fast VMs, lastest in hardware, and enough RAM to power even the hungriest of our services.

Incentivized

• Performance - the servers perform really well, even under stress. We have some long build processes running concurrently, and the server [can] serve other applications without any problems.
• Secure - for the most part, the servers are very secure and IBM provides many tools to help [make] sure the servers stay that way.
• Highly Available - while we have experienced various downtimes and outages with other IBM Cloud offerings, so far, we have not experienced any with [IBM Cloud] Bare Metal Servers.

Incentivized

• The L7 load balancer can be difficult to get set up. It's limited in its functionality, especially with the container engine.
• It's hard to find certain objects on the web console. Often times the things I need to get to are buried in advanced menus.
• Google's decision to only support MySQL on their relational DB service means that I have to manage Postgres instances in Compute on my own, managing everything from storage to backups.

Incentivized

• Firmware upgrades are not always easy to perform and can be required at unusual time intervals at different datacenters.
• No networking monitoring is available.
• Changes on the IBM side can cause an outage, so you MUST plan for redundancy when building out.

Incentivized

Its pretty good, easy and good performance. Also, interface is very good for starters compared to competitors. Infra as Code (IaC) using Terraform even added easiness for creation, management and deletion of compute Virtual Machines (VM). Overall, very good and very easy cloud based compute platform which simplified infrastructure, very much recommend.

Incentivized

Due to cloud computing taking over the market, I have moved to cloud computing. It is so much easier upgrading or downsizing a virtual server on the cloud vs bare metal. I find it way more convenient on cloud computing. The provisioning takes way too long for bare metal servers.

Incentivized

Having interacted with several cloud services, GCE stands out to me as more usable than most. The naming and locating of features is a little more intuitive than most I've interacted with, and hinting is also quite helpful. Getting staff up to speed has proven to be overall less painful than others.

Incentivized

Google Compute Engine works well for cloud project with lesser geographical audience. It sometimes gives error while everything is set up perfectly. We also keep on check any updates available because that's one reason of site getting down. Google Compute Engine is ultimately a top solution to build an app and publish it online within a few minutes

Incentivized

The raw computer power is excellent; our applications feel snappy, pages load almos instantly for our customers and so on. The primary reason it is not a perfect 10 is that the native tools for monitoring individual VM performance can be complex, making it challenging to easily diagnose specific resource bottlenecks without significant configuration

Incentivized

• The documentation needs to be better for intermediate users - There are first steps that one can easily follow, but after that, the documentation is often spotty or not in a form where one can follow the steps and accomplish the task. Also, the documentation and the product often go out of sync, where the commands from the documentation do not work with the current version of the product.
• Google support was great and their presence on site was very helpful in dealing with various issues.

Incentivized

Great responsiveness and detailed know-how from the team. Self Explanatory and good resources on the Web to resolve issues. Good communication on issues via email. Good response times on issues which arise and where we have received support from the IBM support team. We believe that IBM is a great Partner to base our IT applications and we believe that a critical infrastructure like a cloud backend will be well served if we continue to base it on IBM.

Incentivized

The implementation of this software took place as we planned. The performance time taken for full functionality was very reliable with positive results. The customer support team was the best team I have ever met in my career experience. They are always with timely responses when reached to offer any help.

Incentivized

When configuring Amazon ECS, it is a bit confusing as you are not able to find the actual issue. You need to enable Additional AppInsights to get detailed level info, which is not a concern when configuring on the Instance Level. Moreover, Azure VM does not provide an in-browser option; instead, it is Azure Bastion, but for that, you have to enable a dedicated subnet, which is a bit unnecessary.

Incentivized

Configured file systems on bare metal servers and was able to increase the size whenever required. Can limit the costs initially to understand the application demand and need. Later, have the flexibility to increase the size of the file system as the application grows bigger and bigger without any hassle.

Incentivized

It works really well with other Google Cloud services, making it easy to build scalable solutions across different teams and locations.

Incentivized

• Scalability means flexibility and less upfront costs
• Can become expensive when hard set compute requirements are clear, but things like Spot VMs can help here too, or just having your own infrastructure and scaling up with Google. This is for more advanced cases though
• Ramp up time is long, but after that it is quick to do many things and ROI is awesome

Incentivized

• [I feel] IBM caused significant damages to their acknowledged "gross negligence." [...] [In my opinion,] holding customers/data hostage to limit gross negligence is an extremely poor practice.
• [With my experiences,] our investment was a tremendous loss in time & resources. Their lack of support, [in my opinion,] has caused us to pivot our entire business model and revenue stream. Our product re-launch has been setback by ~18 months due to damages caused by [in my experience, to be] IBM's gross negligence.