Cloudant is a fully-managed (24x7) data layer service.
It is based on storing JSON documents and built upon the Open-Source Project CouchDB.
But Cloudant adds other Open-Source Software like Amazon Dynamo for high availability and scalability that can span multiple racks, data centers, or cloud providers.
Apache Lucene for advanced full-text search and GeoJSON for geo-indexing.
And these three frameworks are just the top of other great enhancements.
Cloudant also offers flexible consumption models (pay-as-you-grow multi-tennant & dedicated) and through the managed service the flexible shema, cloudant makes the developers more agile and faster.
Scale = data size & concurrent users
Four major types: Key-Value, Document, BigTable, and Graph
If you look at the NoSQL options, they basically break into three dominant flavours and then a fourth, the Graph Store that’s—and we picked the first three being dominant flavours; these are the flavours of things that you see people really going after in a big way for either OLTP or warehouse kind of offerings, you know, kind of mainstream things that we would do with DB2. The Graph Store isn’t really so much something that would—someone would use with high volume OLTP or complex warehouse kind of applications, but the Graph Store has become pretty pervasive because it’s got some really powerful analytics capabilities and reasoning engine kind of capabilities that I’ll take you through.
In a nutshell, Couchbase Server takes all the chewy NoSQL goodness of CouchDB, and gives it the crisp hard edge of a memcache frosting.