Cloudant represents a strategic acquisition by IBM® that extends the company’s Big Data and Analytics portfolio to include a fully managed, NoSQL cloud service. Cloudant simplifies the development cycle for creators of fast-growing web and mobile applications, by alleviating the burdens of mundane database administration tasks. Developers are then able to focus on building the next generation of systems of engagement – social and mobile applications – without losing time, money, or sleep managing their database infrastructure and growth. Critically, Cloudant is an enterprise-ready service that supports this infrastructure with guaranteed performance and availability.

Built atop a CouchDB-based NoSQL data layer, Cloudant’s fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) enables applications and their developers to be more agile. As a part of its data layer, clients have access to multi-master replication and mobile device synchronization capabilities for occasionally connected devices. Applications can take advantage of Cloudant’s advanced real-time indexing for ad hoc full text search via Apache Lucene, online analytics via MapReduce, and advanced geospatial querying. Mobile applications can use a durable replication protocol for offline sync and global data distribution, as well as a geo-load balancing capability to ensure cross-data center availability and optimal performance. Cloudant’s RESTful web-based API, flexible schema, and capacity to scale massively are what empower clients to deliver applications to market faster in a cost-effective, DBA-free service model.

This IBM Redbooks® Solution Guide describes the IBM Cloudant features. It is the first in a series of three IBM Redbooks publications on Cloudant. Be sure to read the others: IBM Cloudant: Database-as-a-service Fundamentals, REDP-5126 and IBM Cloudant: Database-as-a-service Advanced Topics, REDP-5189.

Cloudant represents a strategic acquisition by IBM® that extends the company’s Big Data and Analytics portfolio to include a fully managed, NoSQL cloud service. Cloudant simplifies the development cycle for creators of fast-growing web and mobile applications, by alleviating the burdens of mundane database administration tasks. Developers are then able to focus on building the next generation of systems of engagement – social and mobile applications – without losing time, money, or sleep managing their database infrastructure and growth. Critically, Cloudant is an enterprise-ready service that supports this infrastructure with guaranteed performance and availability.

Built atop a CouchDB-based NoSQL data layer, Cloudant’s fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) enables applications and their developers to be more agile. As a part of its data layer, clients have access to multi-master replication and mobile device synchronization capabilities for occasionally connected devices. Applications can take advantage of Cloudant’s advanced real-time indexing for ad hoc full text search via Apache Lucene, online analytics via MapReduce, and advanced geospatial querying. Mobile applications can use a durable replication protocol for offline sync and global data distribution, as well as a geo-load balancing capability to ensure cross-data center availability and optimal performance. Cloudant’s RESTful web-based API, flexible schema, and capacity to scale massively are what empower clients to deliver applications to market faster in a cost-effective, DBA-free service model. This IBM Redbooks® Solution Guide describes the IBM Cloudant features. Figure 1 shows the Cloudant Do More Data Layer.


Figure 1. Cloudant delivers the most flexible, scalable, and always available solution for developers of big mobile and “Internet of Things” applications, via a fully managed database-as-a-service

Did you know?

The NoSQL data management market is burgeoning: forecasts expect the value of the market to grow to USD $14 billion between 2014 and 2018. Additionally, over 50% of NoSQL solutions use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)-based document data stores (including Cloudant).

Business value

It is clear that the momentum behind big data, mobile, social, Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud initiatives is transforming the modern IT profession. We are already seeing an explosion of new products and applications developed for these platforms, and the expectation is that these products will experience ever-increasing consumption by established and emerging markets. Agility and elasticity are key in the mobile application environment, where being able to rapidly scale up performance is necessary to accommodate fluctuations in usage and load on your infrastructure. In the mobile space, the demand on these systems can change on a day-to-day basis, and it is necessary for developers to have a solution in place that allows them to scale up without having to scale their internal resources, as well. Web and mobile application databases – and their administrators – must be prepared to face issues of cost, performance, scalability, availability, and security head-on; all of which carry uncertainty and risk.

IBM Cloudant eliminates this complexity by enabling developers to focus on building next-generation applications without the need to manage their database infrastructure or growth. A fully managed cloud data layer service, Cloudant offers its clients the high availability, scalability, simplicity, and performance that modern web and mobile applications demand. The scalability of a fully managed cloud DBaaS solution simplifies the application development cycle and offers Cloudant clients greater agility for launching new products or responding to an ever-changing market: build more, grow more, and sleep more.

Cloudant provides the following benefits: