Rackspace Fires Back in the Cloud Database Wars
According to Network World’s Brandon Butler, Rackspace follows Amazon in beefing up its database tools. Indeed, with the recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) announcements around their new database offerings, Rackspace announced some new database capabilities for database hosting and management from a company called Cloudant.
Cloudant is a NoSQL database service from the company by the same name, and is now a service within the Rackspace cloud. This service adds to the database arsenal that Rackspace already provides.
“Cloudant provides database clusters on dedicated machines that can be dynamically scaled across multiple data center sites, the company says. Its DBaaS is CouchDB compatible, has a Restful JSON API and a MapReduce engine to perform analysis of data stored in the product using text search.”
There are a few clear trends here. First, databases are required to have a successful public IaaS offering, and AWS is leading the way with others like Rackspace following in their footsteps. Second, the use cases of these databases are all over the place. Those who choose to leverage these databases should consider them early stage. Finally, the sweet spot in cloud-meets-database is databases like Cloudant that pray to the NoSQL Gods, and provide the ability to leverage the resources provided in the public cloud to scale.
