I have a confession to make. We have been neglecting our friends in Europe. More than a year ago we launched our multi-tenant data layer with clusters on the east and west coasts of the US. Since then we have added shared clusters in Singapore and Japan and private clusters in numerous sites around the world. But, despite the requests from developers in Berlin, Amsterdam, Dublin, and more, we resisted opening up a shared cluster in Europe.

This was folly and it ends today. We are happy to announce the immediate availability of our brand-spanking-new EU-based cluster, “Jenever.” Jenever lives in SoftLayer’s new data center in Amsterdam just a few short milliseconds round trip from almost anywhere in the EU and UK. No longer will our European developer friends be forced to send requests or users across the Atlantic to hit the DB.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE! You can now choose the location of your data when you sign up or at any time. We maintain four shared clusters around the world, “Julep” in Northern Virginia, “Meritage” in San Jose, “Sling” in Singapore, and “Jenever” in in Amsterdam. When you sign up for a new account you will be asked where you want your data to live. If you ever want to change clusters, you can switch via your ‘accounts’ page. Note that switching clusters happens seamlessly but asynchronously. It takes some time to move an account so don’t expect this to happen instantly.

We at Cloudant believe that your data should live where your application lives, and your application should live where your users live. Our goal is for the Cloudant data layer to cover the globe, providing developers all around the world low-latency access to their data. With Jenever in Amsterdam, we take one step closer to this goal.