Rackspace Unveils Cloud Database As A Service With Cloudant

By Jack McCarthy
December 14, 2012 7:19 PM ET

Cloud infrastructure provider Rackspace is offering a database as a service for developers of Web and mobile applications in its Cloud Tools program.

The NoSQL database as a service is provided by Cloudant through its Data Layer, a collection of database clusters hosted in Rackspace's worldwide data centers.

Cloudant's Data Layer offers a CouchDB-compatible, RESTful JSON API; a MapReduce engine; and built-in full-text search, based on Apache Lucene, which is a Java-based, open-source information retrieval library.

Rackspace already offers a database service, Cloud Databases, and Cloudant's database as a service will complement it, Stephen Salas, Rackspace cloud market development manager, said in an interview with CRN.

"We are a leader in the cloud, and we are continually looking for technology partners to fill gaps," he said.

Cloudant gives Web and mobile apps developers a globally distributed "data layer as a service" for storing, analyzing and distributing application data, and as such it will work well with Rackspace's cloud infrastructure service, Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle said in a statement.

"Cloudant customers deploy highly distributed, data-intensive, real-time applications, which is an ideal fit with Rackspace open cloud's global reach and tremendous performance," Schoettle said.

Rackspace Cloud Databases uses MySQL, the open-source version of the traditional relational database management system. In contrast, NoSQL databases are non-relational, scalable, distributed and open-source, and thus more suited to work well with Web and mobile applications.

The collaboration follows soon after Amazon Web Services made significant cloud data warehousing and management announcements at its partner conference in Las Vegas last month.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels unveiled AWS Data Pipeline, a way to manage and schedule the flow of data collection systems, such as Amazon Storage Service System, DynamicDB, Elastic MapReduce and Amazon's new Redshift data warehouse.

PUBLISHED DEC. 14, 2012

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