Cloudant handles software and hardware provisioning, management and scaling, and support. You'll receive high availability and elastic scaling of the hardware as your provisioned throughput capacity needs change. Learn about the other benefits of database as a service (DBaaS).

Document data stores are represented in JSON, where each document is itself a complex data structure. Documents can contain nested structures of various data types, and users can query these structures, retrieving or updating the document, or portions of it, without locking down the database. Documents are stored and retrieved through a unique primary key.

JSON’s appeal stems partly from its schema, which can rapidly evolve without admin intervention. JSON offers an elegant model for persisting Java or JavaScript objects due to its affinity with JavaScript—with no need for "heavyweights" such as OpenJPA or Hibernate to build a data-layer solution. Storing a JSON document to represent a real object is fairly intuitive.

While Cloudant is API-compatible with Apache CouchDB, unlike CouchDB, Cloudant has layered additional open-source technologies for full text search and geospatial indexing capabilities. Both share a common replication protocol, so you can synchronize copies of your Cloudant data to a remote CouchDB instance—or vice versa—with a click. Explore the differences.

Offline-first architecture means building an app without an internet connection; the architecture lets you interact with your app without connectivity. Using Cloudant Mobile Sync, mobile apps can collect and read data when the network is unavailable. Once the connection is established, the data will sync with Cloudant. Cloudant also works with Hoodie and PouchDB.