Amazon Web Services vs. IBM Cloudant vs. DigitalOcean Droplets

This is something that is actually common across most cloud providers. A comprehensive understanding of one's use cases, constraints and future directions is key to determining if you even need a cloud solution. If you are a 2-person startup developing something with a best-scenario audience of 1k DAU in a year, you would very likely best served by a dirt-cheap dedicated Linux server somewhere (and your options to graduate to a cloud solution will still be open). If, however, you are a bigger fish, and/or you are actively considering build-vs-buy decisions for complicated, highly-loaded, six-figure requests per minute systems, global loadbalancing, extreme growth projections - then MAYBE you solve all or part of it with a cloud provider. And depending on your taste for risk, reliability, flexibility, track record - it might be AWS.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

DigitalOcean Droplets are the best choice for developers teams that need reliable Linux servers to deploy their projects, the ability to create a droplet for testing purposes then destroy it, and only get charged for the few hours used makes the chances of messing up very slim. DigitalOcean Droplets is a great solution because the servers are scalable and the process of adding more resources like CPU or RAM to an existing droplet takes only a few minutes and once a server is scaled up it can also be scaled down if necessary which is perfect for supporting a temporary peak in traffic for example.

Incentivized

• During the month-end, we experience high resource utilization; however, with AWS's scalability, we can effectively tackle the peak load.
• With AWS IAM, we don't need to set up complete infrastructure for identity and access management, as AWS provides end-to-end IAM services.
• With AWS, development has become very easy as it's very quick to spin up and destroy the environment, which saves costs.

Incentivized

• 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!!

Incentivized

• Simplicity to scale services--the interface is very quick and effective to use
• Reliability--this is key for us, as any downtime effects our reputation
• Keeps the costs down--hosting our own equivalent infrastructure would cost a lot more

Incentivized

• When there is any misconfiguration of EC2 related to SSM Connect. It doesn't clearly states that what particular configuration is missing.
• Debugging networking related issues could be improved.
• From the security group page, it's difficult to determine which resource a security group is associated with.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• In terms of an availability zone, they have limitations not available in most of the geographical locations.
• No live support is available which can cause problem if you have outage.
• Number of service is quite limited.

Incentivized

We are almost entirely satisfied with the service. In order to move off it, we'd have to build for ourselves many of the services that AWS provides and the cost would be prohibitive. Although there are cost savings and security benefits to returning to the colo facility, we could never afford to do it, and we'd hate to give up the innovation and constant cycle of new features that AWS gives us.

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

Incentivized

AWS offers a wide range of powerful services that cater to various business needs which is significant strength. The ability to scale resources on-demand is a major advantage making it suitable for businesses of all sizes. The sheer volume of options and configurations can be overwhelming for new users leading to a steep learning curve. While functional the AWS management console can feel cluttered and less intuitive compared to some competitors which can hinder navigation. Although some documentation lacks clarity and practical examples which can frustrate users trying to implement specific solutions.

Incentivized

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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Other platforms dashboard console is more difficult to use. DigitalOcean's dashboard is clean, simple, and straightforward

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Availability is very good, with the exception of occasional spectacular outages.

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.

Incentivized

AWS does not provide the raw performance that you can get by building your own custom infrastructure. However, it is often the case that the benefits of specialized, high-performance hardware do not necessarily outweigh the significant extra cost and risk. Performance as perceived by the user is very different from raw throughput.

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.

Incentivized

The customer support of Amazon Web Services are quick in their responses. I appreciate its entire team, which works amazingly, and provides professional support. AWS is a great tool, indeed, to provide customers a suitable way to
immediately search for their compatible software's and also to guide them in a
good direction. Moreover, this product is a good suggestion for every type of
company because of its affordability and ease of use.

Incentivized

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 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

Incentivized

The API's were very well documented and was Janova's main point of entry into the services.

• 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.

Incentivized

Amazon Web Services fits best for all levels of organisations like startup, mid level or enterprise. The services are easy to use and doesn't require a high level of understanding as you can learn via blogs or youtube videos. AWS is Reasonable in cost as the plan is pay as you use.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

DigitalOcean Droplets is continuously evolving to be more and more powerful. It has great features and has low cost options, which is really great for developers. Its CDN, Loadbalancer, etc. make it a good place to host a high-traffic application. Moroever, DigitalOcean Droplets has a nonprofit program that helps nonprofit sites to run their infrastructure, which is tremendous and no competitor of DigitalOcean Droplets does that.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Using Amazon Web Services has allowed us to develop and deploy new SAAS solutions quicker than we did when we used traditional web hosting. This has allowed us to grow our service offerings to clients and also add more value to our existing services.
• Having AWS deployed has also allowed our development team to focus on delivering high-quality software without worrying about whether our servers will be able to handle the demand. Since AWS allows you to adjust your server needs based on demand, we can easily assign a faster server instance to ease and improve service without the client even knowing what we did.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Digital Ocean has been great helping us move web apps to the cloud
• Digital Ocean has been really helpful when hiring contractors
• The interface could use some work, but overall its not terrible

Incentivized