IBM Cloud for developers: VPC, classic infrastructure and the free plans

IBM Cloud is easy to dismiss and easy to misread. It is not competing for the same customer as DigitalOcean, and it is not trying to out feature AWS. It is aimed at regulated enterprises, hybrid estates and organisations that already run Red Hat, and it is competent at that.

For a developer arriving without that context, two things need explaining first.

Two generations of infrastructure

VPC. The modern generation: software defined networking, subnets and security groups you would recognise from any other cloud, virtual server instances with per second billing, block storage, and API driven everything. This is where new work belongs.

Classic infrastructure. The older estate inherited from the SoftLayer acquisition. Different networking model, different console areas, and still the home of some bare metal offerings and legacy services. You will encounter it in documentation and occasionally be routed into it by a service that has not moved.

Almost all early confusion with IBM Cloud comes from following a classic infrastructure tutorial while working in VPC, or the reverse. Check which generation a document refers to before following it.

The Lite plans

IBM’s free tier works differently from the credit based trials elsewhere. A number of services offer Lite plans that stay free within monthly limits and do not expire. Object storage, a small Kubernetes allowance on some plans, databases, functions and several AI services have them.

Combined with a separate trial credit for new accounts, this makes IBM Cloud a reasonable place to run a genuinely free small service indefinitely, in the same spirit as Oracle’s always free tier though with a different product mix.

Virtual server profiles

VPC instance profiles follow a readable naming scheme: a family prefix, a generation, and the vCPU and memory figures. The families cover balanced, compute optimised, memory optimised, storage optimised and GPU profiles, which maps closely to what every other provider offers.

IBM also offers Power and LinuxONE based options, which is genuinely unusual. If you have workloads that belong on those architectures, this is one of very few public clouds that will run them.

Where the platform is actually strong

• Red Hat OpenShift. IBM owns Red Hat, and managed OpenShift here is a first class product rather than a partner listing. If your organisation has standardised on OpenShift, this is a natural home.
• Regulated workloads. The financial services oriented controls and confidential computing options are aimed squarely at banks and insurers, and they are more than marketing.
• Hybrid. The tooling assumes you have an on premises estate that is not going away, which is a more honest starting position than most cloud marketing takes.
• Bare metal. Available with a wide range of configurations, including on classic infrastructure.

Where it is weaker

The developer experience is behind the leaders. Documentation is uneven, the console has more than one design era visible at once, and the community is much smaller, so the answer to an unusual problem is more often a support ticket than a search result. Third party tooling coverage is thinner too.

If you are building something ordinary and want the path of least resistance, this is not it. If you have a specific reason to be here, those reasons are real.

Account setup notes

• Resource groups organise services for access control and billing. Set them up before creating anything.
• IAM is service scoped and more granular than it first appears. Start restrictive.
• Outbound SMTP is restricted, as it is on every provider. Plan around a relay rather than direct delivery.
• Set a spending notification early. As always, alerts inform rather than cap.

For the other enterprise leaning provider in the catalogue, see Oracle Cloud vs IBM Cloud. If free capacity is what you are after, the Oracle Cloud free tier guide covers the most generous option available.