Amazon SimpleDB vs Cloudant: What are the differences?

What is Amazon SimpleDB? Highly available and flexible non-relational data store. Developers simply store and query data items via web services requests and Amazon SimpleDB does the rest. Behind the scenes, Amazon SimpleDB creates and manages multiple geographically distributed replicas of your data automatically to enable high availability and data durability. Amazon SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results. Your data is automatically indexed, making it easy to quickly find the information that you need. There is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later. And scale-out is as simple as creating new domains, rather than building out new servers.

What is Cloudant? Distributed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for web & mobile apps. Cloudant’s distributed database as a service (DBaaS) allows developers of fast-growing web and mobile apps to focus on building and improving their products, instead of worrying about scaling and managing databases on their own.

Amazon SimpleDB and Cloudant can be primarily classified as "NoSQL Database as a Service" tools.

Some of the features offered by Amazon SimpleDB are:

• Amazon SimpleDB automatically manages infrastructure provisioning, hardware and software maintenance, replication and indexing of data items, and performance tuning.
• Amazon SimpleDB automatically creates multiple geographically distributed copies of each data item you store.
• You can also choose between consistent or eventually consistent read requests, gaining the flexibility to match read performance (latency and throughput) and consistency requirements to the demands of your application, or even disparate parts within your application.

On the other hand, Cloudant provides the following key features:

• Managed- Cloudant's big data experts monitor your data 24/7 to ensure its high availability and safety.
• Distributed Multi-Master Database- All read and write transactions can be synced across Cloudant's global data network without global locks, providing true high availability of your data.
• Geo-load Balancing- To keep latency low, our geo-load balancing infrastructure routes requests to the copies of the data that are geographically closest to the requestor.