Scaling our data layer without headaches
Updated April 28, 2021
Scaling our data layer without headaches
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloudant
Cloudant allows us to scale our data layer without worrying about the operations side of things to manage such a big cluster. Cloudant is the main database system for our company. It's business critical for our company and our many customers rely on its performance on a daily basis to perform their activities.
Pros
- Scale your data layer without issues.
- Great support team.
- Very few operational problems
Cons
- No detailed monitoring (which views are used or not, performance metrics) on top of the basic stuff provided by CouchDB
- No playground environment to test some very large map/reduce queries (and therefore any changes in the design have to reindex the whole DB).
- Pricing is quite steep
- No integrated backup features, as you'd expect from an enterprise product
- Ability to quickly scale and launch a new tenant on the system
Actually, none. Since we rely on Cloudant.
IBM Cloudant Feature Ratings
IBM Cloudant Usability and Efficiency
IBM Cloud Support and Implementation
Using IBM Cloudant
10 - - Developers
- Operations
- Operations
We don't have any engineering working specifically on the support. Of course some of the developers are involved with Cloudant on a day-to-day basis.
Skills required:
- JSON
- Javascript (views), we use nano for the Node.js parts of the application
- Map/reduce concepts
- Document design.
- Java (we use Ektorp for the Java parts of the application)
Skills required:
- JSON
- Javascript (views), we use nano for the Node.js parts of the application
- Map/reduce concepts
- Document design.
- Java (we use Ektorp for the Java parts of the application)
- Storing the business transactions performed offline
- Storing usage metrics
- Storing content configuration documents
- Reporting on all of the above.
- Distributed replications
- Waiting on some really cool use cases for DashDB.
- More reporting with DashDB.
- More ad-hoc reporting.
- Much more storage of data.
- Automatic archiving of the database (e.g. like Amazon Glacier) would be a killer feature.
Evaluating IBM Cloudant and Competitors
- Product Features
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
Features, since we rely on CouchDB's interface. But also the gold support contract that gives us peace of mind and a dedicated support engineer in case of questions. We have been very happy with the support provided to our team.
No, we are happy with the service. The selection process was very simple since we were already using Cloudant through the Heroku connector (which was unexpectedly terminated, to be honest).
IBM Cloudant Training
Configuring IBM Cloudant
- Avoid as much as possible the Cloudant Search
- Avoid large documents (prefer a lot of small documents).
- Use UUID as _id whenever possible to avoid naming conflicts (especially in distributed environments where you don't control this).
- Learn to write efficient views (instead of search)
- Learn about handling the 429 error code!
- You don't need to have replication of the data on 8 nodes by default (check out the Q parameter)
- Avoid large documents (prefer a lot of small documents).
- Use UUID as _id whenever possible to avoid naming conflicts (especially in distributed environments where you don't control this).
- Learn to write efficient views (instead of search)
- Learn about handling the 429 error code!
- You don't need to have replication of the data on 8 nodes by default (check out the Q parameter)
No - there is no facility to customize the interface
No - the product does not support adding custom code
Everything can be driven by API requests (even stuff like scheduling, creation of custom shards type), it's very rich and well documented.
Using IBM Cloudant
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Consistent Convenient Feel confident using | Requires technical support Lots to learn |
- Editing the docs in the dashboard
- Writing ad-hoc queries
- Permissions management
- The Dashboard is slow and takes time to load many databases.
- Writing a new map/reduce view indexes the entire DB for every change. In Couchbase, you have a feature to create a view for a subset of the data, this is very convenient.
IBM Cloudant Reliability
Relationship with IBM
Monthly spending credits were slightly discounted compared to base list price.
IBM Cloudant Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | Escalation required |
Yes
We have a gold support contract.
Yes - Yes, some deployments done a few months ago were related to some issues we raised.
Our account contact director Chris Snow is helping us to develop some extensions to Cloudant Sync during his free time.
IBM Cloudant Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a minor issue with the implementation - We designed the system around the CouchDB architecture, so this was always part of the implementation since day one. Cloudant actually provided the "service" around the CouchDB technology.
- Designing the documents to be scalable.
- (Manually) sharding of the document on many databases was a key design decision for us (we shard per "day"), so that we can more replicate back and forth.
- Designing performing views for large amounts of document (ad-hoc reporting) is very tricky.
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