One of the very early decisions a developer or a team has to make when building any production-quality application is the choice of a persistent storage mechanism. Until a few years ago, this choice, more often than not, boiled down to a relational database such as Oracle, SQL Server, or PostgreSQL. However, the rise of NoSQL solutions such as MongoDB (http://www.mongodb.org/) and CouchDB (http://couchdb.apache.org/)—document-oriented databases or Redis (http://redis.io/), Riak (http://basho.com/riak/), keyvalue stores, Neo4j (http://www.neo4j.org/), and a graph database—has widened the choice for us. Please check the Wikipedia page on NoSQL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL) solutions for a detailed list of various NoSQL solutions including their classification and performance characteristics.

There is one more buzzword that everyone must have already heard of, Cloud, the short form for cloud computing. Cloud computing briefly means that shared resources (or...