UPDATED 06:00 EDT / MARCH 23 2015

Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold NEWS

Couchbase moves into the microservices era with multi-dimensional scaling

Truncated IcosahedronCouchbase Inc. is breaking up its namesake document store and turning the individual components into discrete services that will deploy separately to make the whole more efficient. The overhaul represents a historic departure from the conventional way of building databases.

Like practically every other enterprise application, the software that organizations use to manage their information has traditionally come in tightly-integrated bundles. The way that information is stored changed over the years, as has the data itself in many cases, but not the packaging. That is, until now.

Couchbase Server 4.0 is a symbol of the broader industry shift toward modularity that originated from the early success of web giants such as Google and Netflix Inc. in decomposing their complicated services for easier implementation. The paradigm is engulfing the entire industry.

The wind fanning the flames is coming from the development community, where the emergence of a convenient means to modularize applications in the form of containers has set off a mass migration to the new model. Adoption is growing so rapidly that Microsoft is already hard at work incorporating the lightweight virtualization into next major release of its server operating system.

But the microservices approach has so far received little attention in the analytics world outside of Hewlett-Packard Co.’s efforts to apply the paradigm to Hadoop. As Steve Tramack of the hardware stalwart’s data engineering unit explained to SiliconANGLE, his team is trying to have each component relegated to hardware optimized for its specific requirements.

Couchbase Server 4.0 implements the same concept. The new multi-dimensional scaling feature in the forthcoming release will offer the ability to deploy the three services that provide the core management functionality of its platform to different parts of a clusters.

That way, an organization can run indexes in a partition that has been allocated the necessary storage capacity while directing queries to the servers with the fastest processors. And the operations team can even have a handful of severs fitted with extra memory cards just to handle caching.

That model is much more efficient than the conventional approach of evenly distributing the database across every node in the cluster, which required making compromises across the board. The improved utilization comes at the expense of increased complexity, but that’s more than worth the potentially massive savings that a large organizations with upwards of terabytes of data and thousands of employees to support can gain from functionality.

The feature provides Couchbase with a powerful advantage over the competition, but if history is anything to by, the multi-dimensional scaling option may not stay unique for very long. It’s only due to arrive in the summer, which provides rivals with valuable time to catch up. ​


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