Item: Couchbase Server
Rating: 9
Author: Tyler Twitchell

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are implementing Couchbase to improve performance for several applications in our datacenters. Couchbase has become one of the core applications for our SaaS offering that we are relying on for more and more of our infrastructure. We are primarily using it as a replacement for MSSQL but we have found that it also works for several other areas of our technology suite.

Pros and Cons

Improved Performance
XDCR between locations
Ease of expanding the cluster size

At rest encryption
The ability to handle large data sets without the need for nodes that have huge amounts of memory.

Return on Investment

The ease of deployment and scalability withing Couchbase has been a great asset to our teams, allowing us to deploy a solution in Couchbase in 20 mins.
We have yet to deploy an existing application into Couchbase, but hope to see massive performance improvements once we do so.
New deployments have gone smoothly as we have transitioned to using Couchbase for new product offerings.

Performance

The performance of Couchbase ranks up at the highest I have seen with all the various applications we use. It excels at key/value pair look ups and queries but due to it's very nature of storing much of it's running process in memory, transactions are faster in Couchbase than in many of the other software applications we considered as a SQL Server replacement.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle SQL Developer

Cost and speed are some of the biggest concerns and the reason we chose to go with Couchbase. For less critical applications we can get away with using Couchbase community edition and work just fine, but when it came time to move our largest databases over the speed of search and querying Couchbase data was critical as was the ability to replicate data to another datacenter for disaster recovery.

Key Insights

Do you think Couchbase Server delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Couchbase Server's feature set?

Yes

Did Couchbase Server live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Couchbase Server go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Couchbase Server again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft SQL Server, Splunk Cloud, Apache Kafka

Scalability

Being able to add a new node on the fly is very handy and allows for growth which is just a few clicks away. The addition of new nodes to the cluster is seamless and quick and the ability to do this from a single UI makes for easy Administration of the product.

Likelihood to Recommend

Scaling and performance are the main benefits that I see from using Couchbase. It seems where speed is not necessary that another model would be preferable to have a hybrid between speed and the ability to store large amounts of data without the need for servers with a crazy amount of RAM or having to create 40-50 servers to accommodate the need.

Pleased with the choice to use Couchbase

Overall Satisfaction with Couchbase