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.
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.
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.
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?
seiji, we are planning on releasing the apps separately as well (esp. rexi) and accompanied with blog posts. Also, we will transition the copies of apps that we have been using to their public projects (ibrowse, mochiweb, etc). But we wanted to get this open first. Thanks for the feedback.
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
(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.
