Cloudant is an IBM software product, which is primarily delivered as a cloud-based service. Cloudant is a non-relational, distributed database service of the same name. Cloudant is based on the Apache-backed CouchDB project and the open source BigCouch project. Cloudant's service provides integrated data management, search, and analytics engine designed for web applications. Cloudant scales databases on the CouchDB framework and provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and commercial support for CouchDB and BigCouch. Cloudant's distributed CouchDB service is used the same way as standalone CouchDB, with the added advantage of data being redundantly distributed over multiple machines. Cloudant was acquired by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

from the start-up company of the same name. The acquisition was announced on February 24, 2014, The acquisition was completed on March 4 of that year. By March 31, 2018, Cloudant Shared Plan will be retired and migrated to IBM Cloud.

History

Cloudant was founded by Alan Hoffman, Adam Kocoloski, and Michael Miller. The three met in the physics department at MIT where they worked with large data sets from experiments such as the

Large Hadron Collider The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, ...

and the

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC ) is the first and one of only two operating heavy- ion colliders, and the only spin-polarized proton collider ever built. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, and used ...

. In early 2008 their ideas for fixing the "

big data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

problem" caught the attention of Silicon Valley–based

Y Combinator Y Combinator, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator and venture capital firm launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 5,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, Californi ...

, which resulted in $20,000 seed funding. The company also received an early seed round of $1 million from Avalon Ventures in August 2010. Cloudant was designed for

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

, automatically distributing data across multiple servers in addition to scaling the database to accommodate web applications. In August 2010, Cloudant released free BigCouch under an

Apache License The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software ...

(2.0). Cloudant offered services including support, consulting services and training. Cloudant delivered their first product in the third quarter of 2010. Cloudant has over 2500 customers for its hosted service as of January 2011. In November 2010, Cloudant was recognized as one of ‘10 Cool Open-Source Startups’ by CRN. Cloudant was regularly recognized in the local Boston startup community, named as one of the ‘Top 5 Database Startups’ and ‘Top Ten Cloud Computing Startups’ in Boston’s popular technology column by Joe Kinsella, ‘High Tech in the Hub.’. On February 24, 2014, IBM announced an agreement to acquire Cloudant. The acquisition closed in March, after which Cloudant joined IBM's Information and Analytics Group. In September, 2016, IBM Cloudant completed the donation of the BigCouch project to The Apache Software Foundation, resulting in the release of Apache CouchDB 2.0. CouchDB 2.0 incorporates many of the improvements made by Cloudant and BigCouch to the original CouchDB project, including clustering capabilities, a declarative query language and performance enhancements.

Differences with CouchDB

Cloudant's hosted database extends CouchDB in several ways: * Chained MapReduce Views * Java Language View Server allows usage of Java for CouchDB map reduce analytics. * Application programming interface keys for programmatic access to CouchDB database.

References

External links

Cloudant

CouchDB

BigCouch

Developer Preview: Cloudant Search for CouchDB

IBM Information Management
{{IBM Cloud computing providers Cloud infrastructure Distributed file systems IBM acquisitions IBM cloud services 2014 mergers and acquisitions

History

Differences with CouchDB

See also

References

External links