Any guidance on moving from Cloudant to CouchDB? Are you hosting it yourself? If so, has the amount of maintenance been more than you expected, or was it mostly setup time and then forget about it?
Yup, hosting it ourselves. Its a peach. There are few things that it doesnt come with out of the box - clustering, Full text search, geoindexing, chained map reduce, auto compaction, index auto-updation. Once thats done, if anything it was more forget about it than Cloudant, which bills on requests / thoroughput. This can catch you out because continuous replications between databases on the same cloudant account are also counted as requests and billed as such. And continuous replication is very chatty. So if you have a particularly creative multi-master setup, like a per user db -> masterdb kind of thing going, this can eat up your thoroughput / push up your bills with no practical benefit.
Its really openresty + couch that does it for me. The idea of writing security / validations / routing etc right into ngnix combines beautifully with the CouchDB way of thinking.
Ah, yeah, you weren't the only one bitten by that. We actually went and changed the Cloudant metering model recently so that you're billed on provisioned throughput rather than total request volume. You get dramatically more predictable billing, with the tradeoff that clients need to handle a 429 Too Many Requests response if the Cloudant instance is under-sized. More here:
We (Cloudant) recently changed the pricing model to help with this. You can now take a fixed-cost plan that charges based on reserved throughput capacity instead of metered use. This should help with the replication scenario. See
