Couchbase Cloud DBaaS is Here

It’s my pleasure to announce the general availability of Couchbase Cloud, our new Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) product, making its debut on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our beta announcement earlier this year drummed up so much excitement and interest, that we found ourselves with a hugely oversubscribed beta trial. 

The interest came both from existing Couchbase customers, who provided invaluable input to help us create the best NoSQL DBaaS in the market, as well as those new to Couchbase. Evidently, there are many organizations seeking alternatives to their current solutions. 

Our research uncovered three main drivers for change:  

  1. The desire to migrate off of legacy systems
  2. The need to reduce IT operating costs
  3. The motivation to build new applications faster

The oversubscribed beta is also a sign of the times – the challenges organizations are facing in the current economic environment. The uncertainty in today’s economy is spurring enterprise IT departments to rethink their current strategies in order to lower operational costs across the board. This is driving increased migrations to the cloud, even for the oldest, most precious data resources. 

The Nitty Gritty

Couchbase Cloud is a fully managed, automated, and secure DBaaS built on Couchbase Server. It offers customers complete control of their costs and their clusters, without compromising data security or migration into and out of the clouds of their choice. This translates into an acceleration of cloud adoption plans and an opportunity to transform their business in new ways. In a nutshell, Couchbase Cloud assists in controlling costs while simultaneously enabling organizations to rapidly build transformational applications. 

Further, customers can deploy, manage, and operate Couchbase Server across multicloud environments with just a few clicks. It is flexible, highly available, and provides a differentiated economical option for enterprises looking to reduce operational tasks while taking advantage of the most powerful NoSQL technology. And economical options plus reduced operational tasks equate to lower TCO.

Other features include: 

  • The customers’ choice of infrastructure configuration
  • Automated in-VPC deployment with built-in scaling, failure recovery, and upgrades
  • Unified monitoring and alerting
  • Multicloud deployments and hybrid cloud cross datacenter replication (XDCR) support
  • Data secured in flight and at rest for end-to-end security

A Modern DBaaS Solution Built Like No Other

We set out to architect a modern DBaaS solution around the following key design principles:

  • Leverage Couchbase Server and cloud best practices to deliver a solution that is reliable, highly available, performant, and secure for global deployments
  • Provide a highly available control plane leveraging Couchbase Server’s inherent HA capabilities (XDCR, rack zone awareness)
  • Leverage Couchbase Autonomous Operator and open source technologies such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, Grafana, and Terraform to automate the deployment, configuration, and management of Couchbase
  • Offer customers levels of configuration and licensing transparency such that they maximize their IaaS resource consumption and maintain the benefits of their own negotiated discounts with their cloud service provider

We faced a critical architectural choice regarding where the data plane (Couchbase Server) would reside: Couchbase’s or the customer’s public cloud environment? Ultimately, we determined that the best choice to meet the needs of our customers was to enable the data plane to run in the customer’s public cloud environment, adding significant benefits to our customers.

First, in terms of economics, it enables customers to directly procure their IaaS from their cloud provider. Without any intermediaries, customers are able to leverage reserve instances and reduce their TCO, for example, AWS advertises over 75% savings when choosing reserved instances instead of on-demand pricing. When the customer is ready for production, they can performance match their Couchbase services to their cluster nodes by taking advantage of multi-dimensional scaling of each service for fine-grained control over their configurations. A secondary benefit of our in-VPC deployment is that data stored in Couchbase remains within the customer’s virtual private cloud environment, where they continue to maintain their own security best practices and have full control over their data, its security and sovereignty (where data physically resides). And finally, this architectural approach supports more deployments and use cases. For example, customers can even leverage Couchbase as a persistent cache to increase the performance of third-party (legacy) databases already running in the customer’s public cloud environment.

Couchbase Cloud Control Plane

We built a single, omniscient control plane to run Couchbase Cloud and manage all your Couchbase clusters from a single interface. Your DevOps people log in once and can see how every cluster is behaving. It’s easy to use and pretty slick. First, it’s a front end to our embedded, Kubernetes-based Autonomous Operator that customers have been using and enhancing for years, so it’s already battle-tested. It manages everything from choosing cluster instances to instantiating clusters, upgrading them, backing them up, replicating them around the world, and more. 

For developers, Couchbase Cloud provides self-service database access, using the Couchbase SDKs in the languages of their choice, including C, .NET, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, or Scala. They can also import data into their Couchbase cluster in a matter of seconds, browse the data in their JSON documents, and then query it from the same interface using N1QL, Couchbase’s SQL-based query language for JSON. And if you don’t know N1QL, the documentation is built-in because the management console comes with pre-set best practices that enhance usability, availability, security, and reliability. N1QL is easy to learn because it behaves like SQL – it’s declarative, it uses nearly identical syntax, and even supports JOINs. Pairing the control plane with your SDK creates an agile development environment to accelerate application development, and when you’re ready, on-demand scaling makes it easy to test, deploy, and manage growth. Since Couchbase Cloud is fully managed by our experts with always-on support, DevOps admins can offload tedious and time-consuming operational tasks, eliminate costly monitoring and external configuration software, and just pay attention to how their Couchbase-powered applications are performing. 

Now, Let’s Get to Work

Our architectural choices as well as pricing options have resonated strongly with everyone we’ve spoken to including analysts and customers. We offer hourly consumption pricing, as well as prepaid, discounted Couchbase Cloud Credits to reward annual commitments. Customers who leverage Credits can scale up and own their usage based on their application requirements, and we don’t penalize them for missing a minimum consumption threshold one month or exceeding the next. You pay for what you use. We feel that by combining the performance profile of Couchbase Server with the customers’ ability to both choose the nodes of their infrastructure and configure Couchbase to optimally use them, along with our competitive and transparent packaging, we’ll be delivering best-in-class TCO. 

Now, it’s time for you to give it a try. Start a free 30-Day Free Trial today and start experiencing Couchbase Cloud. Couchbase Cloud is available on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, with Google Cloud Platform available in 2021.

Author

Posted by Scott Anderson

Scott brings more than 20 years of experience in finance, operations, product management, and general management to Couchbase. As SVP of Product Management and Business Operations, he is responsible for driving Couchbase’s product and solution strategy, product roadmap, pricing strategy, competitive strategy, documentation, and development advocacy. Most recently he was SVP and GM of a $1.5B business at Veritas, where he spent 15 years in various positions. Prior to then, he spent eight years at Oracle serving in various finance and business operations roles. Scott holds a bachelor’s degree in Business and Finance from the University of the Pacific.

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