Recs.
Updated
Previously IBM Bluemix, IBM Cloud is a Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform that combines, VPS, Bare Metal hosting, and containers, along with the integration of IBM Watson, in one single service.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Generous allocation for Free Trial (Lite) users.
IBM Cloud allows you to sign up for the free trial, without a credit card. It also gives you an option to upgrade to the Pay-as-you-go account which gives you a 200 USD credit from the upgrade at any point in time. The service also has a very generous allocation for Lite services, the Kubernetes Lite node having 4GB RAM and 2 CPUs for a Lite Node.
Cons
Con Pay-as-you-go Upgrade requires a additional verification check
Due to the bare-metal hosting provided in the service, all customers who upgrade to a Pay-as-you-go account would have to undergo an identity check as part of the security processes.
Con Expensive
For a paying customer, the standard Pay-as-you-go pricing for a VPS instance is about 20 USD or so for the smallest instance, which is very expensive compared to a similar sized one from DigitalOcean. Indicating pricing is more tailored for established industries, rather than startups.
Recommendations
Comments
Out of Date Pros + Cons
Con Does not provide a Web Dashboard from the console for Kubernetes
Due to the nature of the service to only provide nodes for Kubernetes, one would find that the dashboard itself is lacking, and instead, finds instructions on how to access it via kubectl, which is Kubernetes's native CLI. For most people, it may end up cumbersome to set up.