CloudBolt Reviews

My main use case for CloudBolt includes having a centralized self-service provisioning and orchestration, allowing me to manage hybrid and multi-cloud provisioning across AWS, Azure, GCP, VMware, and other cloud providers. I also leverage the platform for policy-driven cloud governance to enforce cost and compliance guardrails to our end customers, cost and usage visibility through chargebacks and showbacks reports, and infrastructure automation where CloudBolt integrates with various infrastructure as a code platforms, ITSM platforms, and workflows.

One specific example of how my team uses CloudBolt for self-service provisioning is that we have customers with footprints spread across public and private cloud environments, and we provide a centralized self-service platform where predefined blueprints or templates are available for them to provision resources. They can select the target cloud environment and provision resources using these templates. Another real-world example includes chargeback or showback, where we create different groups in the organization and use the platform to provide reports based on their resource consumption.

My main use cases for CloudBolt are self-service provisioning, governance and cloud guardrails, cost and usage visibility, and infrastructure automation.

The best features CloudBolt offers include governance and policy control, allowing security teams to set up their specific guardrails with governance at scale. Multi or hybrid cloud abstraction provides a single pane of glass for different types of environments, and self-service catalogs enable technical or business users to request services without multiple tickets. CloudBolt also offers strong integration capabilities that work well with existing tools without disrupting the current environment.

From an integration standpoint, CloudBolt works well with various public and private cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, GCP, VMware, and Nutanix, as well as different virtualization software, infrastructure as code templates such as Ansible and Terraform, ITSM tools such as ServiceNow, and CMDB platforms.

CloudBolt has positively impacted my organization by managing multiple cloud environments for thousands of users with a complex enterprise workflow that has helped reduce man-hours required for provisioning resources. We have achieved faster delivery through standardized operating procedures and reduced reworks due to automation. The chargeback and showback mechanisms allow us to charge different business units according to their consumption, providing better governance, lower risk, and lower cost, resulting in a good return on investment.

Since using CloudBolt, I have seen a 25 to 30 percent reduction in service delivery time and an improvement in efficiency of almost 20 to 25 percent within a timeframe of approximately 8 to 10 months.

To improve CloudBolt, I believe the user experience needs enhancement as some users find it somewhat dated compared to newer cloud management platforms. From a telemetry and analytics perspective, while cost insights are good, they are not as advanced as those in a pure cost optimization or FinOps platform. Additionally, marketplace integrations are not as extensive as standalone automation or cost platforms.

I have been using CloudBolt since approximately 2018 or 2019, so I would say, give or take six years.

For others looking into using CloudBolt, I advise defining governance policies early, focusing on building modular automation, and planning integrations in advance, such as IAM, CMDB, or security aspects. It is critical to not overlook the cost models associated with deploying workloads in public cloud and to ensure governance and guardrails are in place when leveraging the platform. Establishing strong policies around resource provisioning and implementing tags when different teams are deploying resources is essential to track costs effectively.

CloudBolt is a truly good platform with strong capabilities, especially considering recent acquisitions such as StormForge for Kubernetes optimization and Kumulus and SovLabs in the past, positioning it well for the future as a single pane of glass for managing different public and private cloud providers. I would rate this platform an 8 out of 10.

We have a platform called Unity that is a private cloud infrastructure for which we are using CloudBolt as a vendor.

On CloudBolt side, we have a tool called Unity, which is the cloud platform. In our day-to-day operations, if a user or a team needs infrastructure, such as a Windows server or Postgres database, they will use CloudBolt platform to provision the infrastructure that will actually run the workflow that we have defined in Unity. In the background, CloudBolt is running, but at the front of it, we name it as Unity. Unity and CloudBolt are basically the same thing; it is just that the name of the platform internally is named as Unity.

The main use case is the provisioning and the lifecycle management of the infrastructure that we provision through CloudBolt. Starting from provisioning and following with day-two actions that include increasing RAM, CPU, and power, and getting these details, among other things, the entire lifecycle management of the infrastructure that we have is managed through CloudBolt.

We are able to do a lot of customization in CloudBolt specific to our use case. That is one of the main things that we considered when we were deciding what vendor to go with. The customization is easy, workflow management is really nice, and the support team is also really helpful in case we need a new feature or anything.

All of the workflows that we have are automated. When we are using CloudBolt, the user just goes and requests, and the entire workflow automation happens in CloudBolt. Some of those come out of the box, and some of them are defined specific to our use case.

Making the lifecycle management automated has made life easier. If it is automated, we do not need to manually go and provision every server request that comes from the user. We have defined everything in the workflow, and the end-to-end provisioning is using the automated workflow, which saves time.

The MCP is still at a very early stage in CloudBolt. If that can be integrated and all the workflows can be managed and customized using the MCP agent, that would be a really good feature to add. They have added it, but it is still in very early stages, so it is not perfect.

It is still in very early stages, so it is not super accurate, but they have started taking steps in that direction. In the future, it would improve, but as of now, it is still in the early stages, so we have not really tested it.

We have been using CloudBolt since I joined this company two years ago.

Nine out of ten times, it is quite stable.

It is quite scalable. We have not seen any performance issues till now.

It is really nice. We have a weekly sync-up call to get a new feature request or if we have any questions regarding it.

We were using VMware Aria Suite, but because of the change in the subscription cost, we decided to switch over to CloudBolt.

Customization, cost, and feature request were all main reasons why we chose CloudBolt. It is easy to use and understandable. Before committing to CloudBolt, see what it offers, how you can customize it to your needs, and the cost aspect of it. It is not a big company as of now, so you will be able to get more value out of your money and more personalization than mature products that are already in the market. I would rate this product a nine out of ten.

My main use case for CloudBolt is provisioning servers. We have a VM environment, so we would use a CloudBolt template and then map it to CloudBolt environment and provision the server for our production.

The best features CloudBolt offers are its speed, which is very fast in terms of provisioning compared to traditional ISO-based methods. This speed has helped my team and organization; we completed a new site setup in under a few days, which would take about a few weeks using traditional methods.

CloudBolt has positively impacted my organization. We have a fairly big catalog on top, so overall my organization really benefits from CloudBolt.

The types of benefits I have seen from CloudBolt include saving time, reducing costs, and improving efficiency in many specific ways.

We are doing a lot of customization. For example, if I want to do a custom scheme or if I want to do a static IP, these kinds of flows I still need to do very manually or through a script, so it would be nice if CloudBolt had additional features.

CloudBolt can be improved. It needs way more customizations when it comes to provisioning itself. When we are provisioning servers, it should also be able to do application installations as part of my post-steps. When we do server provisioning, it should also have an option to install features.

I would like to add more about the needed improvements, specifically regarding hardware and server provisioning.

I have been working in my current field for six years.

CloudBolt is stable.

I did not previously use a different solution.

We have seen a return on investment with CloudBolt.

My advice for others looking into using CloudBolt is that if you are a server admin, it is very useful. I would advise you that CloudBolt will be very useful for your needs.

We use the solution to provide self-service to end users in our virtual environment.

I find the self-service features valuable. In a virtual environment, you don't get that cloud experience. When creating something close to a cloud experience, you need a cloud platform like CloudBolt. Another benefit of using CloudBolt is how it helps with resource control. It helps with resource control, such as with network storage in any infrastructure. Another valuable feature is in the application deployment and customization.

The area of integrating on-prem and cloud needs improvement. Another area that the solution needs to improve on is the UI. The UI can be much better.

I've worked on CloudBolt for about four years. I'm using the most recent version.

The solution is very stable. You will have no issues if you deploy it according to the minimum requirements and best practices recommended by CloudBolt's documentation.

Cloudbox is just an abstraction software. There is no need for scalability. It's quite a simple solution. You might only need to increase the resources you apply to the CloudBold deployment. If, for example, the number of users increases, you might have to check the recommendations from CloudBolt and act accordingly.

We have over 100 internal users. Regarding the infrastructure it sits on, the solution sits on the private of the on-prem, a VMware infrastructure that stands across two sites, the DR and the main production. We have over 60 ESXi of Asterisk and about 500 or 1,000 virtual machines.

We used CloudStack for some reason, and though it's not a directly competitive solution, we received a recommendation to switch to CloudBolt.

The deployment process is straightforward, and we have proper documentation online. After deploying the solution, we tailor it to our taste. After deployment, if we want to integrate it with virtualized on-premises infrastructure and our multi-cloud infrastructures, we create sections or different groups of users and give them access to the resources we want them to be limited to.

We took a week to deploy the solution, but the greenlight took a month or two. After deployment, we went to the test phases. Then, after the test phases, the solution went for generic users and the organization.

I just needed two people during deployment. CloudBolt requires no maintenance. Since we've deployed the solution as a virtual machine, we do regular backups and have never had any issues with it.

We have seen a return on investment after using CloudBolt. We wanted it as an alternate solution and picked it up with pressure from the admin team and the engineers. We wanted something useful for self-service, and it was a good option. The solution serves as the primary object in going for it.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten because the solution is expensive. The license is expensive to acquire.

I found that there is an alternative solution in the market called OpenNebula.

Any user considering CloudBolt should consider what they need in the long run, not just the structure. It's a good solution, but they must ensure it's what they want. We're looking at doing OpenStack after so many years with CloudBolt. Users must check if CloudBolt is what they want in the long run, but the short term might be good. For users who have a multi-cloud and want to manage the entire infrastructure from one pane of glass, CloudBolt is a go-to solution. I rate CloudBolt a seven out of ten.

One use case for CloudBold is creating blueprint templates for multiple clouds. Another is cost management or optimization. There is a piece that comes along with CloudBolt called Kumolus, and there is a lot of interest in that side of cost management.

Cost management is a valuable feature, but the solution's biggest advantage is flexibility. There is a standard framework that CloudBolt provides, but if I'm good with Python, I can tweak it and make it better. I can customize it easily.

The solution is not easy to use. It's not intuitive enough to click anywhere in the solution and make it work. Likewise, Cloudbolt takes a long time to configure and set up properly. If I install an app, I should be able to quickly get it to work without taking a long time to configure and set it up.

I've used the solution for more than two years.

I rate CloudBolt's stability a seven or eight out of ten.

I rate CloudBolt's scalability a seven or eight out of ten. The solution is deployed as a demo, so there aren't many users.

The initial setup is not difficult in the sense that you need a very highly skilled person to do it. The initial setup is a long process with many steps to do it. It's time-consuming to set up and build the solution. By contrast, deploying the solution doesn't take much time, and it's simple.

I have not completed anything big or successful with the solution, but I see its advantages. There will be an ROI depending on how people work today. If people have the tool, they also have automation built in. They get a request, then click a button and do it. For them, it's not a big ROI. But there is a lot of ROI for people who do a lot of manual stuff.

The pricing depends on where the customers are. The system is cheaper if a customer has fewer servers since you pay by the node. Let's say I'm an enterprise with 50,000 servers. I would be paying a lot every year.

I've contacted customer support many times, but I have access to their tech team since we are partners. I've not gone through their support channel. I have a direct hook to them. We have regular meetings where we talk about problems and get answers to them.

If somebody's using the solution for the first time, it's good if the system gives a demo. When you come up, the solution could go "click here, set this up, click here, set this up," and walk you through the steps until you are an expert that needs to be there. There is a setting in the configuration, and sometimes I enable it. That way, when people log in, the solution walks you through that. "First configure the cloud, and then configure this…" It'll walk you through the steps to do it. If CloudBolt has some videos or something I've not seen recently, people can watch the video to go through the steps instead of messing up.

I rate CloudBolt a five out of ten.

We used the solution to manage a pretty substantial financial institution’s IaaS infrastructure. We were also using it to manage the infrastructure as a service of a government area. It was pretty good.

The ability to manage most clouds is helpful, especially with extremely large organizations where we have multiple cloud providers, and we cannot centralize management. It was one of the areas that really helped us, especially with managing and mapping resources. We also used CloudBolt to find a shadow IT resource. Nobody knew what they were doing or who was responsible for them.

Management and finance features are valuable.

The management of SaaS must be improved. It would be great if CloudBolt could also manage SaaS resources.

I have been using the solution for one year.

I rate the product’s stability a ten out of ten. We haven’t had a crunch.

I rate the tool’s scalability a nine out of ten. We had only a little bit of an issue with it, but it was mostly on our part.

Every time I needed technical support, the team was super easy to reach. The team gave me simple answers.

Positive

The initial deployment was super easy.

I see a return on investment in the solution.

The product costs us approximately $200 per month on AWS. The on-premises version cost us $100 per month. The solution is reasonably priced.

The platform works as it's supposed to. It’s really fast. I would recommend the solution to others. I used three other cloud management tools. Overall, I can confidently rate the product a ten out of ten.

CloudBolt is very useful for a customer currently using the multi-cloud model, and wants to manage everything on a single console, e.g. GCP, AWS, Azure, or their VMware infrastructure.

There are also multiple things we can do through CloudBolt which are important. One thing we can do is to schedule power on and power shutdown so those processes are automated. I was able to implement it even in the trial version of the platform. They have a free trial for some servers where the license is not required, so I implemented it on my test environment and that worked fine with me.

Another thing we can use CloudBolt for is VM deployment on the cloud. We need to install the Ansible tower and configure it, but through CloudBolt, we can deploy everything on the cloud.

There are two valuable features we like about CloudBolt. First, we can manage multiple clouds and the on-premises infrastructure on CloudBolt.

The second valuable feature is that we can do customization on the platform. For example, during a deployment, there's a default team on CloudBolt, and we have an agreement with them as their partner, that we can customize the logo, the icon, etc. for our customers. We can put the Sopra Steria logo, or we can customize features on CloudBolt, etc.

I had an issue with the scheduling feature of CloudBolt, but I'm not sure if that's been fixed in the new version. For example: I scheduled a job for powering on and powering off the VM, but there were times it didn't work, so I had to create a new job for it. It's only the scheduling feature that needs improvement. The rest of the CloudBolt features are okay for me.

An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of CloudBolt is costing and the consumption of cloud resources, or how much has been consumed including the cost, should be included in the report to make it easy for us.

I've been using CloudBolt for more than one year.

CloudBolt has very good stability. We tested everything on the platform, and it was very good, so we started a partnership with them. They were also very keen on getting our feedback, and they even assigned a solution architect to us who helped us have a better understanding of CloudBolt. It's a very good platform.

I have not raised any support ticket with CloudBolt, but during the initial phase, we had some concerns, so CloudBolt assigned a solution architect for us, and he has cleared our concerns.

We checked other solutions that worked on multiple clouds, though I can't remember the names. Out of the box, we found CloudBolt to be the top platform.

The initial setup for CloudBolt was easy, both for on-premises and on cloud.

CloudBolt was deployed in-house, and the deployment didn't take more than half an hour.

I'm not aware of the billing part, but I think it was an all-in cost, with no additional costs apart from the standard licensing fees.

We were going to suggest CloudBolt to our customers who are on the multi-cloud model, and we have an agreement with CloudBolt, but we have not implemented it yet for our customers. I have personal experience with CloudBolt, though.

The version of the platform which we're using is two or three versions older. We are business partners of CloudBolt. We have had an agreement with them for eight to ten months, but previously our agreement with them was for over one year.

One person is enough for CloudBolt maintenance.

I would recommend CloudBolt to anyone who is on the multi-cloud model. I'm rating CloudBolt eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for this product is for a mixed set of services, including providing IT, multi-cloud management, single pane of glass control panel, providing metering and charge-back capability, role-based access control, and other things. It's a long list. My focus specifically is with regard to the data center and cloud. Enterprise businesses are using this solution. 

We use this solution ourselves as well as for our clients. We're a partner with CloudBolt and I am a solution specialist/product manager of cloud and data center services.

The product takes care of a hybrid cloud environment and it helps me maintain control and insight across various cloud platforms. With regard to the application blueprint, if I'm able to create that using the platform then they are cloud agnostic, so I don't need to create different blueprints for different cloud providers. I just need to create one blueprint and I can select the target cloud myself. 

The VMware feature is pretty valuable. The role-based access control is valuable. The application blueprinting is something which is really helpful. And the wide support of the cloud provider is something which has also been really helpful. The number of integrations which the product provides out of the box is really helpful.

For improvements, I would say that they could maybe increase the number of integrations and add more out-of-the-box work flows and possibly a new or improved user interface. They would all be features that would improve the solution. Currently, the interface is quite good, but an improved one would be better. With regard to billing and charge back, I would really want the platform to have some of those capabilities.

Integration should definitely be included as an additional feature. An advanced level or an enhanced user interface and maybe a good set of new application blueprint out-of-the-box, which any customer can download and use, would be helpful additions.

I've been using this solution for the last eight months. 

Stability is quite good and it's helped by the support provided by the team members.

Scalability is quite good. 

The technical support is very good. 

Initial setup was straightforward. Deployment took about two hours and required one person to implement. We have about four or five people dealing with maintenance. I carried out the deployment and there are about 15 people in the company using the solution. 

There are no extra costs aside from the licensing cost. 

We were analyzing a couple of solutions and switched to CloudBolt. The features and capability of CloudBolt were one of the major reason for switching. We looked at VMware vRealize, and Cisco CloudCenter was another potential option. Those are the major ones. We were looking for different possibilities for our customers and I wanted to get into the features and understand how both of the tools works so we could complete a comparative analysis. 

The documentation provided on this solution is quite easy to follow and what they provide is enough to be able to deploy the solution. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

The flexibility to provide hook points into any step of the provisioning process as well as the ability to customize and extend reporting, dashboards and server tabs to provide additional information to the end user. No other product we've tested has such comprehensive capabilities natively built in. 5 minute upgrades are the norm. Five minor and one major update later the alphas are almost as rock solid as the GA releases.

Update: The flexibility and speed to deliver new features is definitely the best thing about this company.

We were able to collapse over 95% of our orchestration directly into Chef and CloudBolt as opposed to having well over 300+ steps of orchestration in vCO and multiple scripts to call out to other self developed API's to do that same thing. Our delivery of VM's went form 19-23 minutes to 8-13 minutes depending on the cloud. The willingness of the CloudBolt team to improve their product at a very rapid pace has resulted in a delivery of over 130+ RFE's in less than 6 months to enhance the compatibility with company services, functionality and aesthetics.

Update: We are up to over 200 features in the last year and a half.

Load Balancing (Multiple F5), XaaS Services, Containers, and Parameter Overriding are the only areas left that I have seen that the foundation has been laid for but could use more refinement.

Update: Load Balancing Has Been Rounded Out, Containers are now in, and parameter overriding has been implemented and improved upon several times and XaaS is possible and improved functionality is coming in the next version.

We have been using CloudBolt for about 1 year.

Update: Coming into our 2nd year.

Installation and setup literally took less than an hour and we were provisioning servers into 4 public cloud providers and soon to be 4 private datacenters, 30 minutes later and we had basic Chef integration.

Update: Now we integrate with just about every product CB integrates with as well as several other products such as Men and Mice IPAM/DNS, Akamai, and custom CI/CD pipelines.

Never with a GA release. Everything we have encountered dealing with stability has been due to other systems called (Chef, API's, AD, etc.) not being able to keep up with 100+ server deployments at a time.

Update: Once with an Alpha build and a patch was issued within 4 hours to address.

Not with CloudBolt, during our trial we had over 4K VM's across 4 datacenters, 3 public cloud providers, and 14 different environments.

Update: Now over 5K VM's and no issues.

World class. I have opened personally opened over 1000+ Tickets since November (90+% were RFE's which have been ADDED into current releases since 5.2) and every single one was met with a helpful attitude and usually resolution on the first reply and if it wasn't a WebEx soon followed. Always received a reply same day within a couple of hours for the minor and low priority tickets.

Update: Excellent as always.

Hands down, best out of every vendor we use across any vertical in our business. They are extremely helpful and quick to respond as well as help with suggestions and workarounds for anything that can't be fixed that moment.

Update: Nothing but the best.

We have used vRA for the last year and a half for all of our orchestration. Delivery time, upgrade time and complexity is reduced by 95% and required zero PSO dollars to get setup and to get integrated with all major providers and configuration managers. Finally vRA doesn't support Google, which was the keystone technology for the project.

Extremely simple. From soup to nuts it took 30 minutes to setup. About a day to get everything configured and documented, 2 minutes to do an upgrade and about another 2 weeks to have everything integrated with full stack provisioning in all our current offerings plus 2 additional clouds. We have been spending a great deal of the extra time we saved on the project working on more features and refactoring our Chef builds to deploy even quicker.

We deployed in house with 1 person over the stretch of 2 weeks.

Over a 3 year span, cost savings is projected to be is almost 60% at current scale. From a delivery standpoint, over 50% faster delivery and 95% less touch points.

Buy all that you need at once for the biggest discount, they are very flexible with your situation and can accommodate any licensing scenario you need.

Pretty much the entire upper and lower right Gartner Quadrant plus a few suggestions for team members.

I highly suggest this product. As someone who has worked with just about every orchestration and CMP tool out there, this one has the most potential and best falls in line with a devops/agile mentality not only from a product offering standpoint but from a product development standpoint. I like the fact they keep it simple and extensible and the amount they functionally grow this product between releases is very pretty impressive.

Update: A year later with a few PSO engagements under our belt to get some priorities out of the door quickly and I couldn't be happier. The regular pace of service is phenomenal, the PSO engagements have been comprehensive and delivered quickly and with the quality of a GA even in it's alpha form.

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.