CloudBolt Reviews

CloudBolt's simple to understand framework allows current IT resources to easily automate the entire lifecycle of VM using predefined hook points. The way CloudBolt intuitively placed the ability to implement plugins, remote scripts, webhooks, or actions directly within the product is awesome! You can upload, use github (or http link), or just edit the code right inside the GUI. With CloudBolt we could easily modify our code during the evaluation and development phases and see the results in seconds.

The ability of our tier one and two teams to support CloudBolt was >80% on day 3. Tier III and Architects spent up to 40% of the project time supporting our previous cloud management platform; with CloudBolt we were able to reduce product support to less than 3% of work time spent.

Support for Active Directory groups, currently user management in CloudBolt groupsin managed individually. We had a previous access model that was based on AD groups, and allowed users to be able to use the product with their group membership, so no users were ever added directly to the provisioning system.

We have been using CloudBolt for about 6 months.

Deployment was seamless. We were able to integrate all existing workflows and actions rewritten in python into CloudBolt. Any issues we faced were quickly resolved with the assistance of CloudBolt support.

We found a few of the updates would cause our custom code to stop working the way we intended. A support ticket or simple change and this was easily resolved. We have not updated past 5.3.0.2.

We did find it was a bit challenging to scale horizontally behind a load balancer in an active/active configuration. This was the only case in which CloudBolt Support was slow to respond.

You can tell the CloudBolt staff loves what they do. Customer service is just amazing.

Blazing fast responses, usually within hours, and if they problem persisted they were readily available to jump on call or Webex to resolve the issue.

The Documentation is excellent and very short. You can read every bit in about an hour.

Yes, we previously used another cloud management system. This product offered excellent governance, but supporting of the all the components that are not seamlessly integrated required a lot of expertise and time to understand. On one occasion I remember spending 3-4 hours with support just looking for the right logs.

The CloudBolt ova was deployed in under 30 minutes, including importing all virtual servers from previous deployments. Within 3 days we had our production instance of CloudBolt achieve feature parity with our previous cloud management solution of 1.5 years.

We choose to implement CloudBolt in house, with assistance from a couple members of CloudBolt's team who provided guidance, coding support, and troubleshooting assistance along the way.

We were able to save enough from reduced support cost associated with maintaining and operating our previous cloud management platform within \months to pay for CloudBolt.

CloudBolt is license per server/container managed. Forecast your growth and purchase as much as you can upfront.

No other software was evaluated.

We often said during our evaluation of CloudBolt that if our team of system administrators/engineers built a cloud management product in house, it would be look and feel like CloudBolt. In all aspects they kept it simple.

Overall, we found the ease of use and flexibility to be most valuable. This is a result of a few decisions by the CloudBolt team.

• Focus: It doesn't attempt to manage all infrastructure and application components, but focuses on providing a superior "portal" that can talk to many clouds and third party products.
• Expandability: The product provides many "hooks" throughout the products, where you can insert remote execution of scripts, REST calls, and even custom scripts written in Python, the same language CloudBolt itself is written in, with full access to the underlying CloudBolt database model to extend the product in a myriad of ways.

We only recently (last 12 months) started to build and automation platform. We focused first on platform automation, as we already had a bevy of Jenkins driven scripts in to deploy our applications.

CloudBolt's ease of use, coupled with our initial focus on fully automating infrastructure deployment, has won accolades from our internal stakeholders. A specific development director for one LOB has been our biggest advocate, lauding his ability to provision and destroy multi-server environments on-demand in step with his application releases.

We also took this opportunity to transition to a full infrastructure-as-code model, implementing Puppet Enterprise at the same time, driving a new level of consistency to those deployed environments.

Support for containers is basic and needs improvement. If we were to need more today, we could write Python scripts to make API calls as needed.

The system needs more real-time reporting of actual capacity usage, rather than allocated usage. For example, one LOB has a four node Nutanix brick allocated for their development hardware, and we've had to implement outside-of-CloudBolt processes to give them a true representation of their actual via. allocated usage.

We've used it a little over a year.

It was quite easy. We implemented custom integrations into Puppet Enterprise before it was officially supported, and CloudBolt support was quite helpful throughout.

Not until recently. Over the past few weeks we've hit some odd behavior and hangs due to what CB support says are out-of-memory conditions. We've raised memory available to the CloudBolt VM and are watching.

No, not so far. We have approximately 2500 VMs under management, but haven't yet expanded to include our legacy or overseas data centers.

Very good. They have been very responsive and are very open and quick to implement product improvements.

Very good. They have been very responsive and are very open and quick to implement product improvements.

There was no previous solution in place.

It was a straightforward setup. As mentioned above, we did some custom scripts for integrations to Puppet, modified their Infoblox scripts to suit our needs, as well as implemented Microsoft DNS integration for some environments. These were a bit more complex, but well within the ability of our Python scripters given the supplied examples and answers from CB on some of the finer points.

We implemented it through the in-house team.

Very high, but not constrained to just CloudBolt. We implemented puppet and Infoblox at the same time, and the combination of self-service, automatic IPAM, and config mgmt has delivered environments full of VMs ready for applications that are infinitely more consistent and provisioned in 30 minutes or less where it took several JIRA tickets, inter-team handoffs, and a few weeks to deliver manually.

We made the conscious decision to form a small team exclusively focused on platform automation. The majority of their time in CloudBolt is using it as a service, modifying blueprints in response to user requests, and not very much debugging problems with CloudBolt itself. Puppet manifest writing for new feature requests and administration/refactoring of other infrastructure components that make the system work as a whole (Infoblox, Consul, Jenkins, Nexus, etc) take up the majority of the team's time.

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