What is our primary use case?
We were invited by HPE to do a POC as a partner and services provider. We have the ability to put on the lens of our customers and help guide feedback to ensure a product that will meet our customer's needs both now, and in the future.
How has it helped my organization?
I see this fitting into a lot of our customer profiles, as they are starting to make the transition from a traditional, monolithic, waterfall model into a DevOps CI/CD model. This gets them going - crawl, walk, run - straight from crawl to run pretty quickly.
I can also see this internally, as we have our own demo area where we have to check in/check out, build things up, and tear things down. Being able to reallocate engineering resources from maintaining all that into actually providing demos, it will lower our workload overall, but make it so that we are far more flexible.
What is most valuable?
Our first impressions were:
- The simplicity
- The speed at which it works
- It worked right the first time, out-of-the-box.
These are what really caught my eye. Working with other tools in this space, I have never had anything work on the first day. That was rather impressive.
What needs improvement?
Ironically, most of the features that we might have wanted to see were already introduced in the product announcement today, from what we saw in the beta, which was kind of cool.
You can't come to market unless you have Azure support, and Azure was all over every slide we saw, so that was pretty cool.
A couple of things that I did see, there are a couple of security features that need to be enhanced. It is way too easy to provision a VM onto a public cloud, wide open to everybody. So, there are a couple of issues there. We are obviously going to talk with the product teams and the architects about some of those things; a handful of things here and there.
Most of the things we were looking for were already included. Things that we had requested a month ago, we are now seeing them here: Azure Stack integration and the OneView integration. These were the things we were saying, "Hey, if these were there, it would be really cool. We could use this." All of a sudden, "Oh hey, guess what is going to be at launch?"
I am very eager to get my hands on the next version of this product, and to see what may or may not be missing.
For how long have I used the solution?
Trial/evaluations only.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I was amazed at how stable the solution is. It worked the first day out-of-the-box and I have not had an issue with it since, in terms of a service.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I see this meeting needs of customers of all sizes, from small business up to medium enterprise, and even spots in large enterprise. From a long-term perspective internally, I can see this lasting for us for a very long time, as all the services keep being added.
How this service is going to morph and change? The potential is just unreal. I have never seen anything in this space with this kind of flexibility.
How are customer service and support?
It has been fantastic. One of my colleagues accidentally popped open the Help Chat box in the app and started talking with a level-3 engineer randomly, and this was aside from my having one of the product guys sitting with me, working with level-3 and level-4 developers. So, the support has been spectacular.
How was the initial setup?
It took about 10 minutes and we were provisioning it to AWS. It was less than a day that we were provisioning on-prem as well as the public cloud. I have never experienced anything as simple and as fast as what this did.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We are always evaluating products in this space. One of my primary roles is cloud consulting, especially when it comes to automation and DevOps enablement. We were looking at a broad-range spectrum.
Obviously the big ones are vRealize Automation and vRealize Business, so the VMware products, as well as HPE's - now Micro Focus' - products, with Micro Focus Operations Orchestration and CSA.
With all the time and investment in all the competitive products, still it makes them not even a competitor anymore, with how this works. The fact that this was up and going in minutes, to a day, spoke volumes to the fact that I have worked with some of these other products for days, weeks, or months - even a couple off and on for years - and never got them to fully work properly. This worked right out-of-the-box, within the first day.
What other advice do I have?
We have been using it for just over a month now.
I give it a solid eight out of 10 at this point, mostly because I do not know what is coming out at release and what is coming next. I have been hearing some things about the licensing model that have got me concerned; I think that is still stuff that has not been fully flushed out. So, there are a handful of things here and there that I feel are "wait and see".
I want to give it 10 out of 10, I really do, and I think from a usability standpoint it's a 10, but my own reservations say this sits somewhere around an eight. There are still a few gaps in there. It is not quite fully-baked yet.
*Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Data Strategy is an HPE Partner. We provide HPE hardware and services to a wide range of customers