

Cloudant's BigCouch is Now Open Source - ahoff
http://blog.cloudant.com/cloudant-core-is-open-source

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fmw
Great. The problem with proprietary infrastructure is locking yourself in to a
vendor and that isn't always a safe bet. For me, that is the problem with
Google AppEngine and Amazon SimpleDB. As a happy CouchDB user this makes
Cloudant a contender for future projects (or even existing ones). I don't want
to roll my own infrastructure, but still want the option to move away from a
vendor if I ever have to.

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lzw
Yes, removing lock-in makes it easier to reach buy in.

Plus, if I'm understanding right, one should be able to have the production
system hosted by them, and test code, or generate data on a local system, and
then use the replication feature of couchdb to push the new code NGO
production when ready.... Relatively painlessly.

~~~
boorad
Correct, just replicate between standalone Couch and Cloudant seamlessly.
Replication is a powerful feature of CouchDB, and we also use it internally to
synchronize partitions if they diverge. It is pivotal in how we achieve our
multi-datacenter capabilities, too.

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seiji
Minor gripe: Make individual apps their own repositories so other people can
include them in other projects.

If you want to update mochiweb, itap, etc on couchdb and bigcouch, do you
manually patch the changes into every repository? Is erlang-oauth in couchdb
the same as oauth in bigcouch?

Look at riak for the Right Way™ to package Erlang apps: The main riak
repository has _no_ erlang code
(<http://hg.basho.com/riak/src/tip/rebar.config>). It has one dependency of
riak_kv which in turn includes everything else needed
(<http://hg.basho.com/riak_kv/src/tip/rebar.config>).

Learn to love the gift of rebar -- recursive dependency resolving.

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janl
For a first release I'd say this is a good thing to skip in favour of shipping
:)

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rbranson
Is anyone of note using this in production? (Not hating, just curious)

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jchrisa
Cloudant has a number of big customers who have been in production for about a
year on it. Here is a page where they list a few:
<https://cloudant.com/#!/company/customers>

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gaiusparx
This one took out one advantage Riak has compared with CouchDB.

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wooptoo
Sounds great. It this like mongodb's sharding?

~~~
boorad
as Chris said, it's more like the other systems. See
<http://blog.cloudant.com/dynamo-and-couchdb-clusters> for more information on
our clustering.

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rjurney
This is very cool stuff.

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lzw
(my iPad autocorrect is broken as I was testing international software, so
forgive the typos i miss.)

Love the stuff cloudant is doing and would love to base my future projects on
them, but I can't quite do so yet due to their business model. I really prefer
to outsource hosting and focus on code and never have to deal with machine
configuration or administration.

My issues with the business model boil down to them tying database requests
and storage usage together in their packages at a ratio that probably makes
sense for a lot of businesses but won't for my current project.

The current project involves a large amount of disk space that will mostly be
idle...as it scales, database requests will go up, hopefully dramatically, but
the disc storage will not go up very much at sly percentage wise. A doubling
of traffic might result in a 1% increase in data stored.

I'd be buying one of their most expensive plans, way out of our budget right
now, just to get the disk space.... Which is forcing me to look at
administrating my own machines and oaring .15 a GB/month for storage.
Effectively vastly cheaper than cloudant even with triple redundancy.

The other thing I need is the ability to run periodic processes, such a cron
jobs, and I'm not sure of a way to do this with couchdb. This has me looking
at falling back on appengine.

That's just the feedback of one potential customer, and i am continuing to
look at cloudant and other hosted services to see if I can figure out a way to
combine them to do what i want. For instance, i could run arbitrary python at
a left over dream host account in order to handle the periodic jobs.

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boorad
lzw send us an email... we can almost certainly map out something that fits
your needs. info@cloudant.com

~~~
lzw
Good to know, and I will, once I have my needs characterized sufficiently to
be able to tell you what it is I need.

