Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review It is well suited for large corporate entities, whether they are in manufacturing, sales, engineering, healthcare, supply or shipping. It is easy to understand and operate once it has been initially configured. Expansion of the system is likewise easy to do once expertise has been acquired. The only difficulty with this or any cloud scenario is ensuring where the data is located and managing that securely.
Read full review Pros 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!! Read full review We are able to automate deployment which has been a strength to the geographical distribution of the enterprise. We have been able to work with a wider variety of developer tools and haven't had to customize to fit CloudCenter. It is easier for us to allocate space and allow users to take advantage of the system directly with a minimum of overhead. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review The software and systems don't present a problem to us but the continued interaction with mid-level support teams and vendors can slow down implementation or correction of difficulties we experience. The continued overhead associated with peripheral training on systems we have purchased can cause delays. Language barriers sometimes show up but this, again, is due to remote middle agents that are themselves contractors of or sales agents of the main agency. It slows down communication and can introduce business difficulties. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating Very happy by the commitment given by the team which has been really good over the last 7 years of usage.
Read full review Online Training 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
Read full review Implementation Rating 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. Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We found that the cost advantages were greater by going with Cisco because of our present contracts and the materials and equipment we already had on hand. The reliability of the system, for us, outweighed any cost advantages we might have been realized by going with another provider. Certainly the service and support for the entire system is much better when handled by a single vendor with a good track record.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review We have had a positive return on investment by adopting Cisco CloudCenter as the system is more mature than competitors. We have saved a lot by working with them rather than continuing to act as a defacto test location for other systems. We have been able to reduce the number of staff necessary to operate the system and turn them over to more profitable work. One negative impact we have seen is that it is difficult to map where the data is located at any specific instance. Read full review ScreenShots