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Cloudant, the company offering cloud based CouchDB solutions and creator of BigCouch open source product, has been gaining good traction ever since they delivered their first version of Cloudant in Q3 of 2010. In Q4 of 2010 alone they have seen 400% growth in customers using Cloudant’s hosting services since the release of BigCouch, just over 3 months ago, to surpass 2500 customers for its hosted service. This is a pretty decent start for this young company in the hosted NoSQL space.
Cloudant’s highly scalable data platform is based on Apache CouchDB (see previous CloudAve coverage) and offers an integrated database, analytics and search solution so that organizations can easily tap into the large quantities of data and build data driven applications easily. Cloudant’s hosted solutions help organizations leverage CouchDB and advanced analytics without worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure. Their hosted platforms are designed to take advantage of the distributed nature of cloud computing to offer massive elastic scalability.
Cloudant was founded by three MIT Physicists in 2008 as they worked with petabyte datasets from experiments like Large Hadron Collider. Since they didn’t have the right set of tools to handle and make sense of such large data volumes, they went about building Cloudant which eventually became part of Y-Combinator. Their biggest innovation is BigCouch, the open source fork of CouchDB that adds Sharding and Clustering. BigCouch has an OTP application included that ‘clusters’ CouchDB across multiple servers. This allows for large scale horizontal scalability and fault-tolerance.
BigCouch is a free and open source project for anyone to try it out. Their business model follows the typical open source approach where they make their money using support services and hosted offerings. They offer three different hosted offerings:
- Cloud – A cloud (multi-tenant) based Database as a Service (DBaaS) on top of Amazon EC2. This offering is based on metered pricing (cloud hosting)
- On-Premise – They support hosting their platform on customers’ servers on premise (support contract)
- Private Cloud – Platform is hosted and optimized for private clouds of their customers (support contract)
Cloudant’s hosted solutions supports thousands of applications for businesses of all sizes and shapes. They have also partnered with service providers like Heroku to offer their service as an add-on. Even though CouchOne (a company built by original creators of CouchDB database) offers a hosting solution, theirs is more of instance based hosting than the multi-tenant nature of Cloudant hosting. With 10Gen offering hosted MongoDB solutions (see previous CloudAve coverage), there is a healthy competition on the document oriented NoSQL database space.
Related articles
- Developer Preview: Cloudant Search for CouchDB (cloudant.com)
- MapReduce from the basics to the actually useful (in under 30 minutes) (cloudant.com)
- NoSQL: Scaling Out CouchDB with BigCouch (themindstorms.blogspot.com)
- 7 Cloud-Based Database Services (readwriteweb.com)
- NoSQL: CouchDB: The Most Widely Distributed, NoSQL Open Source DB (themindstorms.blogspot.com)
I’m very excited about the potential for CouchDB as a solution for technical and business problems in life sciences. The ability to rapidly index reams of unstructured text and seamlessly replicate data for local access is huge.
[...] life sciences and bioinformatics January 14, 2011 Leave a comment Go to comments Over at Cloud Ave. there is a nice post on the emergence of CouchDB hosting [...]
Hi Ron, I do think that the CouchDB model treats many scientific data management problems very well. In fact, I remember an entire workshop at Supercomputing 2009 discussing the need for flexible data storage, indexing/query, and sharing for life-sciences data. I have quite some experience solving similar problems in Physics, but am excited to hear more about specific problems in the life sciences.