Cloudant is an IBM software product, which is primarily delivered as a cloud-based service. Cloudant is a non-relational, distributed database service of the same name. Cloudant is based on the

Apache The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño an ...

-backed

CouchDB Apache CouchDB is an open-source document-oriented NoSQL database, implemented in Erlang. CouchDB uses multiple formats and protocols to store, transfer, and process its data. It uses JSON to store data, JavaScript as its query language using M ...

project and the open source

BigCouch BigCouch is an open-source, highly available, fault-tolerant, clustered & API-compliant version of Apache CouchDB, which was maintained by Cloudant. On January 5, 2012, Cloudant announced they would contribute the BigCouch horizontal scaling fra ...

project. Cloudant's service provides integrated data management, search, and analytics engine designed for

web applications A web application (or web app) is application software that is accessed using a web browser. Web applications are delivered on the World Wide Web to users with an active network connection. History In earlier computing models like client-serve ...

. Cloudant scales databases on the CouchDB framework and provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and commercial support for CouchDB and BigCouch. Cloudant's distributed CouchDB service is used the same way as standalone CouchDB, with the added advantage of data being redundantly distributed over multiple machines. Cloudant was acquired by IBM from the start-up company of the same name. The acquisition was announced on February 24, 2014, The acquisition was completed on March 4 of that year. By March 31, 2018, Cloudant Shared Plan will be retired and migrated to

IBM Cloud IBM Cloud, (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. Services As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services including compute, storage, networki ...

History

Cloudant was founded by Alan Hoffman, Adam Kocoloski, and Michael Miller. The three met in the physics department at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

where they worked with large data sets from experiments such as the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundred ...

and the

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC ) is the first and one of only two operating heavy-ion colliders, and the only spin-polarized proton collider ever built. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, and used by an ...

. In early 2008 their ideas for fixing the "

big data Though used sometimes loosely partly because of a lack of formal definition, the interpretation that seems to best describe Big data is the one associated with large body of information that we could not comprehend when used only in smaller am ...

problem" caught the attention of Silicon Valley-based

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...

, which resulted in $20,000 seed funding. The company also received an early seed round of $1 million from Avalon Ventures in August 2010. Cloudant was designed for

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

, automatically distributing data across multiple servers in addition to scaling the database to accommodate web applications. In August 2010, Cloudant released free

under an Apache License(2.0). Cloudant offered services including support, consulting services and training. Cloudant delivered their first product in the third quarter of 2010. Cloudant has over 2500 customers for its hosted service as of January 2011. In November 2010, Cloudant was recognized as one of ‘10 Cool Open-Source Startups’ by CRN. Cloudant was regularly recognized in the local Boston startup community, named as one of the ‘Top 5 Database Startups’ and ‘Top Ten Cloud Computing Startups’ in Boston’s popular technology column by Joe Kinsella, ‘High Tech in the Hub.’. On February 24, 2014, IBM announced an agreement to acquire Cloudant. The acquisition closed in March, after which Cloudant joined IBM's Information and Analytics Group. In September, 2016, IBM Cloudant completed the donation of the BigCouch project to The Apache Software Foundation, resulting in the release of Apache CouchDB 2.0. CouchDB 2.0 incorporates many of the improvements made by Cloudant and BigCouch to the original CouchDB project, including clustering capabilities, a declarative query language and performance enhancements.

Differences with CouchDB

Cloudant's hosted database extends CouchDB in several ways: * Chained MapReduce Views * Java Language View Server allows usage of Java for CouchDB map reduce analytics. *

Application programming interface key An application programming interface (API) key is a unique identifier used to authenticate a user, developer, or calling program to an API. However, they are typically used to authenticate a ''project'' with the API rather than a human user. Diffe ...

s for programmatic access to CouchDB database.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Cloudant

CouchDB

BigCouch

Developer Preview: Cloudant Search for CouchDB

IBM Information Management
Cloud computing providers Cloud infrastructure Distributed file systems IBM acquisitions IBM cloud services 2014 mergers and acquisitions

History

Differences with CouchDB

See also

References

External links