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Compose, IBM’s database-as-a-service (DBaaS) unit, today announced the availability of its RethinkDB database as a hosted service offering.
The production-ready hosted RethinkDB offering is optimized for modern Web and mobile app development, where developers seek a solution that provides flexible, cost-effective scalability for building real-time Web apps and mobile solutions.
RethinkDB is an open-source, scalable JSON database developed by startup RethinkDB.com and used by more than 100,000 developers worldwide. RethinkDB-based databases feature a real-time push architecture that developers can exploit to continuously push updated query results to applications in real time.
“RethinkDB has all the flexibility of a document DB, combined with fantastic set based querying capabilities including joins,” said Kurt Mackey, CEO and co-founder of Compose, in a statement. “It’s a phenomenal primary data store for modern applications.”
IBM acquired Compose in July. Compose offers auto-scaling, production-ready databases to help software development teams deploy data services quickly and easily. The company supports five popular open-source databases: MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL and RethinkDB. IBM did not disclose financial terms of its acquisition of the privately held San Mateo, Calif.-based company.
Compose has provided a hosted beta of RethinkDB for more than a year. The release of RethinkDB from beta includes an additional node for improved performance and failover. An early customer, Groopt, has been using hosted RethinkDB since 2014 to run its app in production. Groopt provides private hosted sites and services for groups to manage communications, forms, payments and membership.
“Working with RethinkDB on Compose has been nothing short of fun and pleasurable,” said John Barker, a software developer at Groopt, in a statement. “Using a database made for modern-day applications that is supported by a team that understands databases, the complexities of providing high availability at the push of a button and ‘Grade-A’ customer service … it’s a rare gem.”
The Compose-hosted service for RethinkDB includes automatic, managed backups; a hosted infrastructure; full stack monitoring; failover and high availability; and a 24-hour global support. Compose’s “elastic” hosted databases auto-scale to handle the growth of modern Web and mobile applications.
Hosted RethinkDB is available now at Compose.io on AWS data centers. The service consists of three nodes, 1GB of data and 102MB of RAM, and is priced at $22.50 per month; each additional GB of storage is $18 per month.
IBM’s acquisition of Compose helped further the company’s strategy of accelerating developer productivity and innovation around open-source and cloud data services. The acquisition of Compose came on the heels of IBM announcing several new initiatives to fuel open cloud innovation, including contributing technology and developers to open-source cloud projects across analytics, mobile and cloud data services. It also came a year after IBM acquired Cloudant, another DBaaS provider.
“Compose’s breadth of database offerings will expand IBM’s Bluemix platform for the many app developers seeking production-ready databases built on open source,” said Derek Schoettle, general manager of IBM Cloud Data Services and former CEO of Cloudant. “Compose furthers IBM’s commitment to ensuring developers have access to the right tools for the job by offering the broadest set of DBaaS services and the flexibility of hybrid cloud deployment.”
The cloud database arena is projected to be worth $14 billion by 2019, and open-source databases like MongoDB play a significant part—and are a rapidly growing portion—in this sector. Driving this popularity among developers is the ability to make Web and mobile applications easy to build and grow, without the distraction of back-end database and systems administration. Thousands of customers across a variety of industries, including retail, the Internet of things (IoT), higher education, marketing services and e-commerce, have created over 100,000 databases with Compose. More than 3,600 companies rely on Compose-hosted databases for keeping their apps in production.