Item: Couchbase Server
Rating: 8
Author: Nevin Vorfeld

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Couchbase is being used as our player database for all of our games at Jam City. It serves as a fast and reliable way to store our players game state data and allow our features and services to leverage it. We also utilize 2 Couchbase clusters. One as primary and a second as a replica of that primary. A S3 snapshot backup is also stored daily from the replica. We run the 2 clusters on identical 14 node AWS linux 2 i3.metal machines.

Pros and Cons

Customer response time
Solid UI/UX for monitoring our data and vitals of the cluster
Ease of mind with auto failovers for bad machines and simple swap/rebalance options

The main downside is the same with any managed product. We sometimes want to have changes or updates to couchbase but need to wait for a new release version or some patch fix.

Return on Investment

It takes care of the hassle of trying to build and manage our own database of player state/data.
Having the UI/UX for deploying and rebalancing the clusters makes it a breeze.

Scalability

So far, the way that we mange and upgrade our clusters has be very smooth. It works like a dream when we use it in concert with AWS and their EC2 machines. Having access to powerful instances along side the Couchbase interface is amazing and allows us to do rebalances or maintenance without a worry

Performance

So far the performance has been great. We do not notice much slowdown for any of our queries or data. The only time we notice slowness is when the game teams want to be extremely granular with their search queries on our CB index nodes. Usually the complexity of their searches are not necessary and we can help them simplify

Alternatives Considered

Amazon DynamoDB

The fact that Couchbase has a better managed solution is what sells us. Dynamo DB would require many more FTE man hours to maintain instead of using Couchbase solution.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited to hold our player data and give us ease of access to it. Most of our multiplayer features in our titles leverage querying couchbase for the relevant player data. The resiliency of couchbase also gives us peace of mind with having a up to date replica and backups. I am not entirely sure were couchbase would not be appropriate in my experience

Couchbase for Mobile Gaming

Overall Satisfaction with Couchbase