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Cloudant DBaaS review
January 04, 2016

Cloudant DBaaS review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cloudant

Cloudant is being used widely in our company across several projects while some of our classified data is still stored on our self-managed servers. DBaaS does save lots of work on deployment and maintenance, moreover, since most of our projects are hosted with Softlayer, where Cloudant hosts with as well, the network latency between our servers and Cloudant doesn't have significant impacts. In addition, NoSQL introduces a new way to make the query and big data storage easier with the understandable API context, programmers who are not familiar with database operations can still figure out the logic at the data processing part.
  • DBaaS means there is no need to deploy your own servers, which saves you the initial investment on hardwares.
  • Cloudant uses JSON as storage data format, which is commonly supported by all languages. As a result, no cost on data conversion.
  • Owing to the relationship between Cloudant and IBM, they can always get the best support and discounts for customers. For example, choosing Cloudant single tenant plan with hosting at Softlayer, there will be some discounts for you.
  • The single tenant plan seems to be expensive for some SMEs - data size may not reach the half of its minimum storage size, however, multi-tenant makes them feel unsafe for their business information.
  • The query language is not friendly for developers who are just moved from the SQL (MySQL, MSSQL...etc). It requires totally different skills.
As I mentioned in the pros, Cloudant offers datacenter choices at Softlayer where we host most of our projects with, in this case, the data transaction can be regarded as being processed in the private SL's backend network which indicates that the latency is lower and no additional firewall needs to be equipped. Moreover, Cloudant charges multi-tenant at the PAYG method, which can easily control our cost.
For the first several months, we ran our projects on AWS, and in order to construct a faster connection experience on data processing, we choose DynamoDB which is one of Amazon's products as well. However, after migrating to Softlayer and being recommended by the sales representative, we start using Cloudant as our new DBaaS solution.
Projects which with less classified data and less initial budget for production environment are great to use Cloudant multi-tenant service for the first several versions. For those sensitive data, unless purchasing the single-tenant plan, the multi-tenant context cannot ensure you a stable and provide the business level SLA.