IBM to Acquire Cloudant | Hacker News Reader

IBM to Acquire Cloudant

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137 pointsdavis_m23 comments

It is funny this kind of came full circle. Damien Katz, the original CouchDB author was working on Lotus Notes as some point in his life. After many years, his "creation" comes back to IBM. There is some irony in there I think.

I remember him disavowing CouchDB and urging everyone to "ride with him" towards Couchbase. There were promises about how CouchDB will get contributions from Couchbase, and how it will get RPM and packaging scripts, docs and continued help. But not much of that happened. The community split. Most CouchDB developers who ended up on the other side of the fense at Couchbase didn't end up committing or helping that much over the years. So I can't see, looking back, anything good at all about that split.

But Cloudant sort of took over helping and watching over CouchDB. Quite a few of the contributors work for CouchDB, and they are very smart and helpful individuals. I hope this means good news for CouchDB as a project. I would want to see it grow.

I'd point towards Adam Kocoloski's (CTO) recent email to the couchdb-dev list: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/201402....

Blog post here:

https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/cloudant_and_ibm_our_...

At Couchbase we created two open source mobile embedded databases (iOS and Android) that can sync with Apache CouchDB / Cloudant / PouchDB. Which is no small contribution. Even Cloudant bases thier mobile stuff on that code.

More info: http://mobile.couchbase.com

Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!forum/mobile-couchbase

I've been working with CBLite for iOS and it's pretty legit. One thing that I have not been able to find on Couchbase's website is a written commitment that CBLite will always be compatible for CouchDB. I know that the current sync gateway behaves similar to CouchDB and so there is an incentive for interoperability, but it would be cool to know you guys will always have CouchDB users' backs on the mobile front so that we can trust you and continue to rely on your code. Who knows, maybe that would entice me to move to Couchbase in the future!

Thanks for the feedback. It's not my place to make commitments for the company, but I can tell you an engineer's answer:

I've yet to see a logical model for multi-master replicated documents that beats what Damien chose when he created CouchDB. So I'd be very surprised if that changed, and as long as that stays the same, interop at the transport layer isn't hard to maintain.

However, there are lots of ways the transport / wire-protocol that we use to transmit the logical model could be improved. So in my perfect world there would be many alternative transports, and the various couches could implement pluggable handlers for them. In the end this would preserve interoperability but also make room to experiment with the details. If you are interested in those conversations they are happening here: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-replication...

It is funny this kind of came full circle. Damien Katz, the original CouchDB author was working on Lotus Notes as some point in his life

It's definitely interesting. I can remember people in the Notes community wondering why IBM didn't either take CouchDB and use it as a new Notes backend, or alternatively push the existing Notes bits as a mature document-based database.

The end quote from Katz's "Formula Engine Rewrite" post[1] is interesting:

"But ultimately IBM killed Iris. In late 2001 IBM folded Iris Associates and converted all the employees to IBM. All the energy the Iris building had was seeping out. Really it was more pushed out by the BS that IBM management kept trying to sell us..."

[1] http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html

Damien's writeup is well worth a read, esp. by programmers who want to know what it takes to get to a high level of proficiency. The Iris work appears to have been a critical experience in preparing Damien to write Couch. Anyone who wants to become a great programmer should read this and emulate his example.

I was at Iris around that time too, and went through the IBM slow-death. I really felt like we had to spend at least one whole day per week (maybe more) dicking around with HR stuff. Career objectives, self-eval, performance reviews, peer reviews.

Facilities and IT systems were a horror show too. I spent 2 whole days registering with various internal websites, filling out forms, getting permissions - just trying to get rid of an unwanted monitor. At Iris you'd just put unwanted stuff outside your office and it would be gone the next day.

Funny, losing the amazing Iris tech-bubble perks kind of sucked, but it was really the daily "being an employee" overhead and red-tape that made IBM unbearable.

> It is funny this kind of came full circle. Damien Katz, the original CouchDB author was working on Lotus Notes as some point in his life. After many years, his "creation" comes back to IBM. There is some irony in there I think.

Actually there is one more step. At some point IBM backed Damien's development of CouchDB: http://damienkatz.net/2008/01/faq_about_couch.html

I don't think it's irony. Early jobs in your career drive your perspective on technology and culture. That imprint stays with you, and you build new things in that model. Even if it wasn't explicit, the child mimics the parent. In some cases it is explicit. (I'll make something that my old employer will want to buy, and configure it to be as obvious as possible a decision)

The email I received from Cloudant:

"Hello-- Today is an exciting day for Cloudant as a business: We have agreed to be acquired by IBM [press release].

What does that mean for you as a customer? Not too much changes, actually.

The key elements of Cloudant that have helped make us successful will not change. Our team will remain intact and will continue to focus on delivering innovative products backed by our world-class operations, services and support teams. Cloudant’s product strategy and roadmap will continue as before, only with faster innovation. By tapping into IBM’s global resources, we can rapidly scale our service and introduce new products that will benefit customers.

Our position of providing a cloud-agnostic data layer will not change and remains an important differentiator for our business. We know that customers need options to prevent vendor lock-in as the cloud industry consolidates. Cloudant and IBM are the latest example of this trend, yes, but with some important distinctions.

We have a clear agreement in place to continue developing and promoting Cloudant as an open platform. Widely accepted standards like JSON and REST APIs will remain, so customers can quickly migrate onto and off of Cloudant as needs change. Cloudant’s participation in the open source community will continue, and at an accelerated pace. IBM has a track record of funding and promoting open technologies, like Linux. Over time, we’ll work toward a similar model with the open source communities close to Cloudant.

Thank you for your continued support of our business. And look for more good things from Cloudant and IBM, coming soon.

Sincerely,

Derek Schoettle CEO, Cloudant"

The Cloudant CTO also commented on the CouchDB developer's list:

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/201402....

That link doesn't work for me

Here's the email that Cloudant's CTO sent to Apache CouchDB:

SUBJECT: Cloudant & IBM: Our Commitment to Apache CouchDB

Apache CouchDB means a great deal to me, and to Cloudant as a company. Cloudant and CouchDB have grown alongside each other over the past several years in one of the more authentic vendor/community collaborations I can think of in Apache history. Today marks the next step in Cloudant’s growth as we enter into a definitive agreement to become part of IBM.

What does this mean for CouchDB? I would not have agreed to this transaction if I had any concerns about Cloudant’s ability to continue its contributions and collaboration with Apache CouchDB. IBM has a strong track record in open source software and a productive relationship with Apache; in fact, IBM was instrumental in bringing CouchDB to the ASF many years ago. IBM is fully supportive of our efforts here, and I’m looking forward to bringing increased resources to bear in support of the project.

CouchDB has the potential to shape the future of distributed data management and computing. 2013 was a year of tremendous progress, as we doubled our committer base and shipped no fewer than eight releases. Already in 2014 we’ve seen amazing progress on long-standing initiatives to enhance the core of the system. The timing is right — in the market and for the community — to take the next big step forward. With your help, that is exactly what we will do.

Truly, the future of CouchDB is CouchDB.

Adam Kocoloski Co-Founder & CTO, Cloudant

Posted this to the blog:

https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/cloudant_and_ibm_our_...

Any details on the value of this deal floating around? At one point it seemed like all new database startups were getting pretty stratospheric valuations. At least relative to their user base.

I'm sure congratulations are in order regardless. The Cloudant team certainly deserves it. They've delivered consistently impressive results with their own product offerings, and with Apache CouchDB.

I have been a very long term customer of Cloudant (low usage, low cost customer) and I have always appreciated their tech. Especially good of them to open source BigCouch.

I doubt IBM buying them will change much of their business for customers.

This will likely further integrate into IBM's SoftLayer platform. The SoftLayer API already integrates with Cloudant, perhaps this means that all Cloudant compute would migrate to the SoftLayer bare metal server infrastructure. This essentially adds dedicated hardware, global footprint for data distribution, and SLA far in excess than what you can get with something like AWS Dynamo.

Actually, the majority of our servers have been on SL bare metal since ~2010.

Any ideas on the valuation of Cloudant?

Their new redesign has been pretty difficult to get use to, especially with shared DB's.

The shared DBs piece has been a tough nut to crack. We decided to release the new dashboard without that piece given how much of an upgrade the rest of it was. The feedback on the new dash has been overwhelmingly positive (except for the shared DBs piece.)

We are working on fixing that piece and completely deprecating the old UI. That change should be coming soon.

Congrats team Cloudant!

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