IBM Cloudant Reviews

Oh yes, we have always struggled on the scalability of our existing databases in our ecosystem, the cost of hardware procurement and maintenance, number of technicians involved in managing those legacy databases are really something we were looking to move away from.


IBM Cloudant DB provides not only monitoring and scaling options, but also standing up and operationalizing the sandboxes for a lot of POCs are managed seamlessly, without impacting other applications.

Yes, we have achieved time/agility to deploy and scale up with fast query response times. Also, in order to process multiple concurrent requests, we have done an integration between the master data management solution (MDM) and Cloudant so that Cloudant also acts as a cache for faster response. The biggest benefit was the saving in hardware investment + cost of server build to get this data base up and running.

Features like replication, monitoring and ease of operation have been the key benefits. Also the ability with work with JSON natively is also a big plus.

It requires very little set up and has therefore greatly assisted us with our work in building prototypes quickly as we don’t have to do all the lower level management of the DB

Monitoring and logging were one of the unexpected things that Cloudant provided. It was a nice surprise. As I also emphasized it is extremely easy to set up and go which makes developing prototypes really easy. Impactful in saving time and money

The simple fact that we could spin up a Cloudant instance quickly in the cloud without the need to procure hardware and software allowed the project to start sooner than what is typical. Being fully-managed the IT department was able to keep staffing levels the same and not have to send a bunch of people off to training.

We have saved a tremendous amount of time. Cloudant works out of the box with practically no setup to create your first database. The time it would take me to just spool up a AWS server is the amount of time it takes to start putting data into your DB. I would spend hours more installing node/git/couch on a linux AWS server, configuring ports and routing tables, not to mention time updating and maintaining the server (both from an O/S security standpoint and from database management perspective). IBM Cloudant really just made it simple to check off DBaaS off our production todo list.

We have achieved huge time savings! The only action we do is verify that the system is up and running in normal fashion, because we no longer have to perform all the tasks covered by the "as-a-service" formula.

Absolutely. Prior to starting with Cloudant, I was spending at least 1-2 hours per week on the DevOps requirements and responsibilities of maintaining my existing self-hosted CouchDB solution. Switching to Cloudant meant that my administration time went from two hours to about five minutes per week double-checking that replication was happening. And it always was. I checked in because it was the responsible thing to do, not because I had any worries about Cloudant's capabilities or service.

Cloudant allows me to sleep at night. I never worry about maintenance, operations, scaling, etc. I can easily see and be notified of potential problems -- though we never had one. On the rare occasion there was a service interruption, Cloudant was on top of it before I could notify them. There is very little time required by my team to think about database operations, which gives us more time to build revenue making features.

Yes, we had a lot of time savings since we started using Cloudant. The impact was about a 15%-19% time savings. Our team now can focus more time on the things that really matter for our company, and of course improve our services and products and make then better and better every day.

Definitely so, moving to the fully-managed service allowed us to focus on developing our core platform without having the engineers distracted by database maintenance. Also, Cloudant team's response times are great, which means that that in the rare occasions where we suffer from a failure, recovery times are short.

Yes. The impact is that I'm not spending all day every day looking at database servers, and adding and scaling database servers. I never worry about system performance, or tuning, or scaling resources. That means a lot to me when I'm not just doing fax data storage, but also developing a client portal, and troubleshooting phone systems. I have enough to manage, and it's nice not to have to manage this.

Yes I have experienced time savings. I used to spend way too much time managing my own servers and dealing with failed drives and lost data. I would much rather have someone else do it who specializes in the area and can take problems in stride and resolve them without getting in the way of the things I want to do.

It indeed saves time. Configured a couple of DB in a minute. There was only one occasion when data stopped writing to DB and I did not set some kind of notification for this.

Yes, it allows us not to worry about the data layer, which is really why we choose for the multi-tenant solution, despite its quite aggressive price-tag (for startup standards).

Yes. In fact Cloudant did all for us. We stored the data and never have to monitor it. The reports are built practically alone. If another approach were used, we needed to do all for ourselves expending more time and resources to achieve the same results. This lately translates into benefits for the company.

Local wrappers for CouchDB, permitted us to speed the project. In the presence of conflicts both local and cloudant databases manage the conflicts very well. The constant replication is trustable, never gave us big problems, even in absence of an internet connection, the post replication manages everything automatically, and the well written documentation permitted that other SQL-oriented programmers adapted quickly to the project.

Though, I agree cloudant has inbuilt methods to easily monitor, operate and scale, there is a little disadvantage with Cloudant in that there are no tools like MySQL which makes the tasks easier or neither it is not free of cost. Researching that took us a while which could have saved time for us. But we saved a lot of time involved in monitoring the scripts.

With Cloudant handling all the server requirements and monitoring allows focus to stay on development and user interaction. Being able to store data without having to worry about availability and storage limits supports a more reliable development environment keeping tasks on track.

As I said before you can build an index in no time! If you have the data and you need to build a search solution in no time you have the right solution and surely Cloudant will be time saving for you. Using it will let you focus on other issues in your product, like building the interfaces, apps, marketing ... etc.

Yes, most definitely. I am a mobile developer by profession and as such lack the core competency when it comes to scaling and distributing data over multiple database servers. This is where Cloudant has been really handy. I spent no more than 10 minutes to set it up and get going. It has saved me months of work.
Also, Cloudant provides the data in an easy to parse JSON format so a lot of time has been saved there as well.

Cloudant does provide the services which can reduce lots of work loads on database management. Through the API of it, we can integrate into our self-developed infrastructure management system. Compared to deploying our own SQL servers, at least there is no need to make the hardware and system health check regularly.

I'm not there yet on my project, but I expect to see this happening in a few months.

Yes, setting up and maintenance was all done by Cloudant. The control panel allows for easy monitoring of what is going on.