Couchbase at Cloud Field Day 17

NoSQL is rapidly becoming a de facto database choice for many modern applications. The new Capella platform from Couchbase is a flexible DBaaS option for developers who love the NoSQL environment in a scalable, hosted platform.

What problems does Couchbase solve?

It’s not hard to guess that performance and costs are top if mind. Couchbase has lots of clients who are also going being the servers and out to mobile platforms.

There are many NoSQL products that purely target a key value store. This is why we end up with data sprawl, and data platform sprawl as well.

Couchbase chose to take on the challenge with a polyglot approach by offering all data services in a single unified platform. This is where Capella is very interesting.

There are localized capabilities but also lots of innovations in replication which also separates Couchbase from a lot of potential competitors.

Now we get to dive into how it’s built!

Inside Capella

The full service set available in Couchbase Capella is pretty exciting. Each of the various services are independent and designed for scale and performance.

The Capella DBaaS platform is able to run both in the cloud and at the edge. Once we get to world of mobile platforms you find a surprising amount of locally operating key value stores inside your app store applications.

The customer stories are pretty impressive and it shows how different the discussions on data platforms are to many of the more infrastructure-focused chats we’ve had at Tech Field Day. It’s great to see more developer-centric discussions happening.

Demo Time!

The demo covered a deployment using the Capella management plane. The way that deployments work is that the data tenant is running in the Couchbase environment and peered to the customer environment or over secure channel via internet.

It didn’t take long to get to the big question of how to secure the data. Currently, access to the data plane is using username:password combination and does not have direct integrations with secrets management tools (e.g. Hashicorp Vault).

Deployment is really simple and I like the controls you are able to get as an administrator. There is also guidance available from the Couchbase team to specifically tune based on your application requirements. Capella runs as multi-tenant at the control plane and the data plane is per-tenant so you don’t have a noisy neighbor challenge or risk of data co-location.

Deep Visibility for Self-Hosted or DBaaS on Capella

One of the most exciting things I discovered in the discussion with Couchbase is that self-hosted Couchbase and Capella offer the same analytics, and nearly the same level of performance tuning controls. It’s a huge win for customers to be able to know they have a like-for-like administration capability while offloading the scaling and much of the Ops functions.

My Thoughts on Couchbase

More developers are using diverse data platforms. It feels like Couchbase has done a great job of being really good at tuning and operating the entirety of the data portfolio. Using SQL++ adds great options for a simple query language and allows you to also create an implied schema using SQL joins for non-relational database content. Very interesting flexibility.

The performance tuning is always an interesting discussion because we tend to get stuck on as we deploy with generic settings and find out the hard way what the performance tuning is needed.

I’m definitely going to dive in much further into the Couchbse Capella platform.

Try it Out!

Luckily, there is an easy way to kick the tires on Couchbase at their website in a live sandbox environment at https://couchbase.live/

Thanks to the Couchbase team for a great presentation!

About Couchbase

Couchbase is the cloud database platform for modern applications. Couchbase’s mission is to simplify how developers and architects develop, deploy and consume modern applications wherever they are. We have reimagined the database with our fast, flexible and affordable cloud database platform Capella, allowing organizations to quickly build applications that deliver premium experiences to their customers– all with best-in-class price performance.

Couchbase website: https://couchbase.com

Couchbase on Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/couchbase

Couchbase on Partnerbase: https://www.partnerbase.com/couchbase

Couchbase on Owler: https://www.owler.com/company/couchbase

Disclosure

Travel and expenses for Tech Field Day – Cloud Field Day 17 were provided by the Tech Field Day organization, GestaltIT. No compensation was received for attending the event. All content provided in my posts is of my own opinion based on independent research and information gathered during the sessions.

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