Joyent, Cloudant Launch Database Service Atop SmartOS update from March 2013

The database as a service market is heating up, as cloud providers look to court application developers with promising offerings. The latest such move is the result of a deepening partnership between Joyent and Cloudant.

Cloudant is now available on the Joyent high-performance cloud platform, and the two today came out today with a multi-tenant Cloudant cluster running in Joyent’s Jubilee data center in Ashburn, Virginia. Dedicated Cloudant clusters running on Joyent will be available this month and can be hosted in any Joyent data center.

Cloudant initially partnered back with in April of 2012. That partnership made Cloudant’s NoSQL DBaaS available on Joyent’s infrastructure.

Joyent has always been tuned towards application developers. "We built Joyent to power real-time web, social and mobile applications, so it makes sense to have a DBaaS partner like Cloudant that’s geared toward operational application data," said Steve Tuck, SVP and general manager at Joyent Cloud. "Giving Cloudant the ability to quickly deploy throughout the global environment of our public cloud service aligns with our focus on scalability and performance. That’s what our customers care about most: low cost, real-time systems that are easy to use and support their apps.”

Joyent’s cloud was built with and runs on SmartOS, an open-source distribution of the OpenSolaris fork illumos, which is optimized to support high-scalability apps for cloud computing. Another differentiator for it is DTrace, a dynamic tracing framework with real-time troubleshooting which provides insight into global system performance. DTrace allows both Cloudant and Joyent to deliver increased application performance.

“Collaborating with Joyent to run Cloudant on SmartOS is just another example of how we efficiently improve service,” said Alan Hoffman, co-founder and chief product officer at Cloudant. “Making sure operational data scales flawlessly with application code is challenging, which is why when we see technology that helps our customers, we start integrating it. Now, with SmartOS, we’re able to quickly provision Cloudant accounts across the global network of Joyent data centers.”

One interesting feature of Joyent is it allows a customer to conceptually build a stack on its website. The company has been partnering with companies throughout the platform, application, data, infrastructure, and services layers.

Cloudant recently received strategic investment from Samsung Venture Investment Corporation.