Cloudant Dashboard: Easier NoSQL DBaaS Usability?

Cloudant is trying to make it easier for application developers using its multitenant NoSQL database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offering. The company has released a new dashboard that is intended to improve the usability of the DBaaS product.

Cloudant Dashboard 2.0 was designed to make it simpler for apps developers to do development, as well as administration and monitoring. Additionally, Cloudant is contributing the software framework that serves as the foundation of the new dashboard to the open source Apache CloudDB project.

“It’s our job to make Cloudant as easy as possible, so our customers can build more software and grow,” said Brad Noble, vice president of Product Design at Cloudant, in a prepared statement. “This version of the dashboard brings core aspects of Cloudant’s service to the surface, like database replication. I can’t wait to see what our customers do with it.”

It looks as though Cloudant has tried to pack a lot into this developer dashboard release, including:

Some of those new and enhanced features should not only increase the usability of the DBaaS offering, but also enable developers to build better efficiency into their designs.

And that’s the goal, according to Cloudant—quick and easy application development.

Other features help to prevent developer errors in MapReduce code and JSON formatting errors—a small touch, but one developers should appreciate.

When things are still tricky or developers have questions, the new dashboard also comes with an accompanying higher level of customer support. Whereas developers previously had to email the Cloudant support team, now they can create support tickets and monitor their status directly within the dashboard.