BigCouch is a highly available, fault-tolerant, clustered, mostly api-compliant version of Apache CouchDB. While it appears to the end-user as one CouchDB instance, it is in fact one or more BigCouch nodes in an elastic cluster, acting in concert to store and retrieve documents, index and serve views, and serve CouchApps. BigCouch has been developed and is continually maintained by Cloudant.
Clusters behave according to concepts outlined in Amazon's Dynamo paper, namely that each BigCouch node can accept requests, data is placed on partitions based on a consistent hashing algorithm, and quorum protocols are used for read/write operations.
BigCouch is made available under an Apache 2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.
If your main intent is to use BigCouch, you can follow this guide. If you’re interested in extending BigCouch, patching bugs, etc., you should follow these instructions instead.
More information can be found on the official BigCouch website. You can also ask questions on or subscribe to the mailing list.
Please see http://bigcouch.cloudant.com/troubleshoot
Cloudant folks are usually hanging out in IRC. Freenode, channel #cloudant. There's also a Google Group.