Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) vs. IBM Cloudant

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon RDS
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) from Amazon Web Services.N/A
IBM Cloudant
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Cloudant is an open source non-relational, distributed database service that requires zero-configuration. It's based on the Apache-backed CouchDB project and the creator of the open source BigCouch project. Cloudant's service provides integrated data management, search, and analytics engine designed for web applications. Cloudant scales your database on the CouchDB framework and provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and commercial support for CouchDB and BigCouch. Cloudant is often…
$1
per month per GB of storage above the included 20 GB
Pricing
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)IBM Cloudant
Editions & Modules
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
$0.24 ($0.48)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for MariaDB
$0.25 ($0.50)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for MySQL
$0.29 ($0.58)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for Oracle
$0.482 ($0.964)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Amazon RDS for SQL Server
$1.02 ($1.52)
per hour, R5 Large (R5 Extra Large)
Standard
$1
per month per GB of storage above the included 20 GB
Standard
$75
per month 100 reads/second ; 50 writes/second ; 5 global queries/second
Lite
Free
20 reads/second ; 10 writes/second ; 5 global queries / second ; 1 GB of storage capacity
Standard
Included
per month 20 GB of storage
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon RDSIBM Cloudant
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)IBM Cloudant
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)IBM Cloudant
NoSQL Databases
Comparison of NoSQL Databases features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)
-
Ratings
IBM Cloudant
9.4
21 Ratings
7% above category average
Performance00 Ratings9.821 Ratings
Availability00 Ratings8.121 Ratings
Concurrency00 Ratings9.921 Ratings
Security00 Ratings9.821 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings9.121 Ratings
Data model flexibility00 Ratings9.921 Ratings
Deployment model flexibility00 Ratings9.121 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)IBM Cloudant
Small Businesses
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.7 out of 10
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.7 out of 10
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SingleStore
SingleStore
Score 9.7 out of 10
Redis™*
Redis™*
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)IBM Cloudant
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(128 ratings)
8.1
(45 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.6
(5 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(5 ratings)
7.7
(5 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(1 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(1 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
9.6
(13 ratings)
8.6
(4 ratings)
Online Training
10.0
(1 ratings)
7.3
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(4 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.0
(1 ratings)
9.6
(23 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)IBM Cloudant
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
Amazon Relational Database Service is a perfect fit for everyone who is seeking for an high-performance cloud-based database service. No matter if Postgres, Oracle, or any other type of relational database. Amazon RDS is our first choice for any kind of database requirement in the cloud. Especially I like the scalability.
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IBM
Our organization found Cloudant most suitable if One, a fixed pricing structure would make the most sense, for example in a situation where the project Cloudant is being used in makes its revenue in procurement or fixed retainer — thus the predictability of costs is paramount; Two, where you need to frequently edit the data and/or share access to the query engine to non-engineers — this is where the GUI shines.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • Automated Database Management: We use it for streamlining routine tasks like software patching and database backups.
  • Scalability on Demand: we use it to handle traffic spikes, scaling both vertically and horizontally.
  • Database Engine Compatibility: It works amazingly with multiple database engines used by different departments within our organization including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Oracle.
  • Monitoring: It covers our extensive monitoring and logging, and also has great compatibility with Amazon CloudWatch
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IBM
  • For us, performance and scalability is the key, and Cloudant DB backed by CouchDB is scalable and performant.
  • IBM Cloudant dB is very easy to provision for sandbox, development, QA as well as production.
  • Support for Java for CouchDB app server analytics enables a greater control for over developers.
  • Schema free oriented very easy to program and build applications on it.
  • We love it!!
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Cons
Amazon AWS
  • It is a little difficult to configure and connect to an RDS instance. The integration with ECS can be made more seamless.
  • Exploring features within RDS is not very easy and intuitive. Either a human friendly documentation should be added or the User Interface be made intuitive so that people can explore and find features on their own.
  • There should be tools to analyze cost and minimize it according to the usage.
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IBM
  • It was only after we went with the cloud-based solution that IBM rolled out an on-premise version.
  • We found that a 3rd-party ODBC driver was required for a few applications that needed to pull data out of Cloudant.
  • The sales process was difficult because the salesperson we used was not as versed on Cloudant as I had hoped.
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
We do renew our use of Amazon Relational Database Service. We don't have any problems faced with RDS in place. RDS has taken away lot of overhead of hosting database, managing the database and keeping a team just to manage database. Even the backup, security and recovery another overhead that has been taken away by RDS. So, we will keep on using RDS.
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IBM
the flexibility of NoSQL allow us to modify and upgrade our apps very fast and in a convenient way. Having the solution hosted by IBM is also giving us the chance to focus on features and the improvement of our apps. It's one thing less to be worried about
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Usability
Amazon AWS
I've been using AWS Relational Database Services in several projects in different environments and from the AWS products, maybe this one together to EC2 are my favourite. They deliver what they promise. Reliable, fast, easy and with a fair price (in comparison to commercial products which have obscure license agreements).
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IBM
It's mostly just a straight forward API to a data store. I knock one off for the full text search thing, but I don't need it much anyways. Also, the dashboard UI they give is pretty nice to use. It provides syntax-highlighting for writing views and queries are easy to test. I wish other DBs had a UI like this.
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Reliability and Availability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
IBM
it is a highly available solution in the IBM cloud portfolio and hence we have never had any issues with the data base being available - we also do continuous replication to be on the safer side just in case some thing goes awry. We also perform twice a year disaster recovery tests.
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Performance
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
IBM
very easy to get started and is very developer friendly given that it uses couchDB analytics. It is a cloud based solution and hence there is no hardware investment in a server and staging the server to get started and the associated delays/bureaucracy involved to get started. Good documentation is also available.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
I have only had good experiences in working with AWS support. I will admit that my experience comes from the benefit of having a premium tier of support but even working with free-tier accounts I have not had problems getting help with AWS products when needed. And most often, the docs do a pretty good job of explaining how to operate a service so a quick spin through the docs has been useful in solving problems.
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IBM
Very happy by the commitment given by the team which has been really good over the last 7 years of usage.
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Online Training
Amazon AWS
the online training & digital content available on the web from AWS was having sufficient information to deploy and run the service
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IBM
online resources are good enough to understand but there is nothing like testing. In our case, we discovered some not documented behavior that we take in count now. Also, the experience in NodeJs is critical. Also, take in count that most of the "good practices" with cloudant are not in online courses but in blogs and pages from independent developers
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Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
IBM
  • Test the architecture on CouchDB helped us to address initial design flaws.
  • The migration to Cloudant as such was very painless.
  • We have migrate our replication system to Cloudant Android Sync for mobile devices.
  • We have regular informal contact with the Cloudant leadership to discuss our use cases and implementation strategies.
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Alternatives Considered
Amazon AWS
In a few words, we are just to confortable working with oracle and sql server. Using RDS add another layer of distributed database in order to backup everything we have in case of a disaster and also complies with authorities locally and internacionally. All database we use, are local in custom servers that we maintain, but we agree to expand this.
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IBM
The feature-set, including security, is very comparable. Overall, IBM's services added to the product are mature and stable, although product support and engineers could be a little better. Global availability is improving, and Disaster Recover Capabilities are great. Overall, it's very comparable to MongoDB as a DBaaS offer, available globally and with great documentation.
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Scalability
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
IBM
The service scales incredibly well. As you would expect from CloudDB and IBM combination. The only reason I wouldn't score it a 10 is the fact that document trees can get nested and nested very quickly if you are attempting to do very complex datasets. Which makes your code that much more complex to deal. Its very possible we could find a solution to this problem with better database planning to begin with, but one of the reasons we chose a service over a self-hosted solution was so we could set it up quick and forget about it. So we weren't going to dedicate a team to architecture optimization.
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Return on Investment
Amazon AWS
  • RDS is costly and thus small business should avoid it as it might not be worthful (in ROI perspective)
  • Downtime is very low and there are automated backups thus we dont have to worry much about technical stuff and can focus more on marketing and sales
  • Due to various automated features such as automated backup etc we dont need a huge technical team thus reducing the cost of maintaining a huge technical team ,
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IBM
  • IBM Cloudant is very secure and we never have to worry about losing data/unauthorized access
  • It is one of the best data backup system and works well
  • Global availability means it is easy to connect to the nearest data center and this reduces load time which is great.
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ScreenShots

Amazon RDS Screenshots

Screenshot of A look inside the RDS console.