Cloudant's cloudant.com Shared plan is being retired on March 31st, 2018, after which data in these accounts will become inaccessible and will be deleted from our servers. Cloudant's Shared plan includes all users who created accounts at cloudant.com/sign-up and that still reside on one of the multi-tenant clusters: baijiu, icewine, jenever, meritage, moonshine, porter, sling.
How can I verify if my Cloudant account is on the Shared plan?
Login to the Cloudant Dashboard for your account. Go to the Account tab on left navigation pane, and then to the Data Location tab. If the radio button is highlighted in one of the Shared plan clusters of Meritage, Moonshine, Icewine, Jenever, Porter, Sling, or Baijiu, then you are on the Shared plan. You can contact Cloudant Support to verify as well.
Where should I migrate my Shared plan account to?
We encourage existing Shared plan customers to migrate their data to Cloudant on IBM Cloud. To help with the migration, IBM Cloudant will waive Shared plan costs involved in doing so. Cloudant on IBM Cloud has quality of service improvements and an SLA at all price points. Working within the IBM Cloud allows your applications to start leveraging a robust ecosystem of cloud services, including:
IBM Cloud Functions for serverless computing.
Watson for machine learning, AI and IoT applications.
Container-based application management, security-scanning and deployment.
Runtimes for Java, Python, Node.js and more.
How does Cloudant pricing and sizing work on the IBM Cloud?
Cloudant on IBM Cloud offers improved pricing based on data usage and provisioned throughput capacity, which allows for more predictable costs and better quality of service than the metered request volume pricing used in the Shared plan. Provisioned throughput capacity pricing means the user decides how much capacity in terms of requests/sec is needed and can toggle that capacity up or down to scale with their application requirements. Provisioned throughput capacity is broken down into three request classes of lookups/sec, writes/sec, and queries/sec. See the documentation for details on the various API requests that make up these request classes and more details on how pricing and provisioning works in the IBM Cloud.
Is there a free Cloudant plan available in the IBM Cloud?
Yes, the Cloudant Lite plan is perpetually free. The Lite plan comes with 1GB of data and includes provisioned throughput capacity of 20 lookup/sec, 10 writes/sec, and 5 queries/sec.
What are the costs for the paid Cloudant plan in the IBM Cloud?
Users who require more capacity than the Lite plan can upgrade to the paid Standard plan that includes 20GB of data, and allows the user to toggle the provisioned throughput capacity up/down as needed in a ratio of 100 lookups/sec, 50 writes/sec, and 5 queries/sec, and pay pro-rated hourly. Data above 20GB is billed at $1/GB-month. Click on the table below for USD pricing in various configurations.
IBM Cloud offers two types of accounts: 1) Pay-as-you-go account via credit card, and 2) Subscription account that comes with fixed monthly billing and discounted pricing. See IBM Cloud pricing for more details.
What is the SLA for the service and support in the IBM Cloud?
All paid Cloudant Standard plan instances have a 99.95% availability SLA with details in the Cloudant terms. IBM Cloud has three tiers of support described here with more details in the IBM Cloud Support docs.
Can you share a pricing example in the IBM Cloud?
You have provisioned a single Cloudant Standard plan instance that has 700GB of data and requires a max of 300 lookups/sec, 100 writes/sec, and 45 queries/sec.
The provisioned throughput capacity requirements would fit comfortably in a capacity setting of 1000 lookups/sec, 500 writes/sec, and 50 queries/sec (see table above) which costs $1.05/hour or ~$760/month.
700GB of data at $1/GB-month would cost $680/month after the first 20GB free
Total for provisioned throughput capacity $760 + data $680 = $1440
Adding the optional Standard support costs 10% of monthly bill or $200 whichever is higher. 10% of monthly bill would be $144 so Standard Support would be $200/month.
Total would be $1440 + $200 for Standard Support = $1640/month
Note that discounts are available with IBM Cloud Subscriptions.
What are the tenancy options and what IBM Cloud location should I use that is closest in terms of latency to my current Shared plan account?
Multi-tenant Cloudant instances are available on the IBM Cloud in US South, United Kingdom, Frankfurt, and Sydney, along with US East available soon. Dedicated environments are available in 20+ locations worldwide. Use the Looking Glass utility to measure ping times.
How do I migrate to the IBM Cloud?
We are offering customers free migration to Cloudant on IBM Cloud. To do this, follow these steps:
Sign up for an IBM Cloud account by clicking on 'Start your free trial' at the new Cloudant homepage https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloudant.
Create one or more Cloudant instances in an IBM Cloud region local to your existing databases using the IBM Cloud catalog. See the docs on how to provision a new instance.
Review the docs on how the Cloudant API works in the IBM Cloud as there are some differences. Most importantly, you will want to make sure your application can handle a 429: too many requests if you should exceed your provisioned throughput capacity. Additionally, the maximum individual document size is 1MB and you will receive a 413: request entity too large if exceeded.
Open a support ticket from the Cloudant Dashboard of your existing cloudant.com Shared plan account with a note stating "I am migrating to IBM Cloud", and we'll waive migration-related charges from your cloudant.com Shared bill.
When we've confirmed this is all set up, set up continuous replications from your cloudant.com Shared plan account to your IBM Cloud account. See the replication guide and API docs if you need assistance. Check out the couchreplicate tool which will setup all the replications between source and target Cloudant instances. Make sure all the data has replicated over and indexes have been built.
Make sure to conduct load and functional testing on your application to ensure there are no issues before migrating your production functionality.
When ready to switch over, update your application with the new auto-generated account URL and credentials for the IBM Cloud instance. See the provisioning tutorial for how to obtain the service credentials of an IBM Cloud instance.
When your application is fully onboarded to the Cloudant instance in the IBM Cloud, contact Cloudant Support to inform us you won't be needing your cloudant.com account any longer so you won't be charged. We ask that customers delete all the data themselves prior to the Cloudant team deleting the account.
How can I export the data out of my Shared plan account?
For those users who don't wish to migrate to IBM Cloud, exporting data can be achieved using Cloudant's standard APIs. IBM Cloudant recommends using the couchbackup utility to export data. Note that if your account is on cluster meritage, you will have to use the shallow mode in order for couchbackup to work.
Are there any changes to the Enterprise plan with dedicated clusters?
Customers using Cloudant Enterprise with dedicated clusters have no change to their service, and can continue to create any number of new accounts that can be moved to their dedicated clusters. Additionally, Cloudant Shared plan accounts can be moved over to existing Cloudant Enterprise dedicated clusters or newly purchased ones.
Can I keep my username.cloudant.com domain and redirect it to the new service on the IBM Cloud?
No, this is not possible so users should plan to update their applications to use the new account URL and credentials that are generated on the Cloudant instances on the IBM Cloud.
What are the dates for retirement?
The key dates for this process are:
November 30th, 2017: Shared plan account retirement announced and migration process enabled.
February 28th, 2018: Webinar "Getting Started with Cloudant on the IBM Cloud" to help with your migration, register here.
March 31st, 2018: All cloudant.com Shared Plan accounts will become inaccessible and deleted from Cloudant servers. March 2018 will be the last monthly bill sent out.
Who do I contact if I have any questions?
Contact support@cloudant.com or open a ticket from within the Cloudant Dashboard if you have any questions about this change, and we'll be pleased to give more details.
IBM Cloud offers two types of accounts: 1) Pay-as-you-go account via credit card, and 2) Subscription account that comes with fixed monthly billing and discounted pricing. See IBM Cloud pricing for more details.
