Cloudant's BigCouch is Now Open Source

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.

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.

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

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

Sounds great. It this like mongodb's sharding?

This is very cool stuff.

(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.