What is IBM Cloudant?

Application resilience

IBM Cloudant is designed for the needs of applications requiring the highest levels of resilience:

• Data remains readable and writable during zone outages with no customer action needed.
• Customers can set up multi-region, active-active databases using IBM Cloudant replication. Reads and writes can be sent to any region at any time, so customers can switch to available regions seamlessly.
• All database upgrades, security patching and hardware maintenance is carried out by IBM with zero downtime. There are no maintenance windows.

Serverless

Customers of IBM Cloudant have no servers to manage, disk to scale and no software to maintain. Instead, they manage their performance and costs using pay-as-you-go pricing based on transactional usage and data storage. They access data through an always-on HTTPS API.

IBM Cloudant is designed to scale. Customers can start from a small, zero-cost Lite plan. They can scale to very large instances on multi-tenant or dedicated plans, which can store terabytes of data. IBM Cloudant has linear billing, proportional to the volume of data stored and requested read, write and query throughput per second. An IBM Cloudant instance can have multiple databases, and each database can store billions of documents.

Paid plans can be scaled up in the IBM Cloudant web UI or API to meet expected demand, or to scale down during quiet times.

Cross-region sync

By using cross-region database syncing, IBM Cloudant customers can ensure their applications remain online during complete regional outages. Data can be synchronised between many regions, increasing resilience further.

IBM Cloudant's replication allows two or more IBM Cloudant databases' changes to be written bi-directionally, whether in the same instance or to a different instance, perhaps in another region or in another account. Data can be synchronised globally, and applications can write to their nearest copy of the data.

Cross-region replication can be used for disaster recovery, retaining a geographically separated data backup or to have a writable copy of data near to your users for low-latency reads and writes. Read more about IBM Cloudant cross-region topologies.

Flexibility

Unlike a relational database, IBM Cloudant supports flexible, schema-free JSON document storage. Applications to store objects as JSON in the database, and can later change the data model without costly database schema changes or migrations.

IBM Cloudant has several querying options:

• Retrieving individual documents efficiently using the document's primary _id field.
• Views for data querying and aggregation using customer-defined keys, built from values inside the document bodies.
• Apache Lucene-based search indexes for language-aware free text matching, or queries on one or more indexed fields.
• IBM Cloudant Query, a MongoDB-like declarative query language that sits atop views, search indexes and the primary index to provide a higher-level API.

HTTPS API, Dashboard, and SDKs

The IBM Cloudant HTTPS API makes it easy to integrate with web applications and microservices, enabling access from virtually any programming language or environment. IBM Cloudant has a web UI to provide easy management of an instance, its databases, indexes, documents, replications and more.

IBM Cloudant provides SDKs to help your application to interact with databases in Node.js, Java, Python and Go.

IBM Cloudant's SDKs transparently interact with IBM's Identity and Access Management (IAM) service to provide access control to the IBM Cloudant instance at a database level.