1. Home
  2. NoSQL Databases
  3. IBM Cloudant Reviews
  4. User Review of IBM Cloudant
Short and sweet
Updated August 01, 2016

Short and sweet

Kris Bandurski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cloudant

It's our primary store for user-generated and transactional data.
  • Scalability.
  • Fast ingest rates.
  • Fault tolerance.
  • Great for building data pipelines (_changes streams).
  • I'd like to have an option of specifying a view (or multiple views) for the _changes stream that will be used to process the documents returned alongside changes (with include_docs=true)
  • Database-specific monitoring dashboards would be great.
  • Ability to tweak job priorities (on dedicated clusters).
We had our cluster scaled out for a promotion that involved a huge increase in write requests. The important thing there is that by scaling out, i.e., having additional nodes spun up, we increased the cluster's processing power and ingest capacity without any downtime.
We used to host CouchDB ourselves, but moved to BigCouch at first for scalability and then to Cloudant to reduce the maintenance overheads.
We use Elasticsearch alongside Cloudant these days, since _changes streams make it easy to feed data from Cloudant into Elasticsearch. Cloudant's search engine works well, but Elasticsearch makes it easier to visualise data through Kibana.




Great when the primary objective is reliable and quick data storage. Not ideal for applications that require running complex, relational queries.

Evaluating Cloudant and Competitors

Yes - BigCouch, which is the open-source distributed CouchDB. We used to host it ourselves, but we decided to switch to Cloudant's DBaaS to reduce maintenance overheads.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
Although CouchDB (and it's distributed version BigCouch) are fairly easy to maintain under moderate load, running them in heavy-traffic production environment requires specialist knowledge that the Cloudant team definitely have. We wanted to sleep more - and now we do!
We wouldn't change a thing.

Cloudant Support

Quick response times, knowledgable and helpful support staff.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None

Using Cloudant

Overall, the tool is very pleasant and easy to work with, monitoring could be a bit more detailed, but I'm sure the Cloudant team will get there!
ProsCons
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
None
  • Building data pipelines.
  • Map-reduce.
  • Search.
  • Monitoring the activity of each database (as opposed to the whole cluster).
  • Accessing shared databases via the dashboard (some features need improving).
  • Tracking the progress of indexing jobs could be easier, some kind of a progress bar would be useful.