Couchbase is one of the premier NoSQL databases and that has been summed up well in this paragraph from the couchbase website:
“The Couchbase Data Platform delivers unparalleled performance at scale, while also providing the unmatched agility and manageability that today’s businesses require to continually improve their customer experiences. Couchbase’s latest release is currently the best NoSQL database platform and introduces new features that makes building rich customer apps easier, including N1QL enhancements, multi-datacenter support in the SDK, N1QL query plan visualization tools, adaptive indexing, and a fully integrated full-text search capability.”
The short of it is the Couchbase platform gives you alot including:
- Scaling to support large datasets (Big Data)
- Multidimensional Scaling (MDS)
- Active-active cross data-site replication (XDCR)
- Queries via a SQL-like query language (N1QL)
- Full text searching
- Eventing
- Offline first mobile-ready database that can sync whenever it is convenient (Couchbase Lite)
By now it should be unmistakable that Couchbase is a flexible and full featured NoSql database; however, the point of this blog post is to discuss the Couchbase Operator on GKE. Why should that be important to me? The simple answer is because it can simplify your life, when using Couchbase on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Let’s discuss how.
Using a managed service such as GKE, means that you do not have manage your K8s clusters yourself. That is a huge benefit in isolation; However, GKE in particular also provides the ability to:
- Deploy a Wide Variety of Applications
- Operate Seamlessly with High Availability
- Scale Effortlessly to Meet Demand
- Move Freely between On-premises and Clouds
The core of this simplification is Kubernetes (K8s). K8s is the dominating container platform and was designed by Google. Google designed Kubernetes as an open-source container-orchestration system, to automate deployment and to scale and manage containerized applications. Traditionally Kubernetes has been applied to stateless workloads like application servers. As a greater number of applications have moved to Kubernetes, there’s been an increasing need to provide stateful storage within Kubernetes clusters. Initial models included pet sets, stateful sets, a sidecar approach, and most recently, the operator approach.
Additionally, since K8s was created by Google the integration with GCP and therefore GKE is arguably the best and definitely the longest tenured.
To continue the topic of tight integrations between products, Google collaborated with Couchbase Engineering to develop the Couchbase Operator. The Couchbase Operator removes operational complexities of running Couchbase. It does this by automating the management of common Couchbase tasks such as the configuration, creation, upgrade and scaling of Couchbase clusters. Essentially an application to manage your Couchbase clusters.
The Couchbase Operator is currently in beta; however, there are customers using it in production right now. If your use-case is of the ephemeral variety then it may apply as well. The exciting part is that there are many features planned and the updates will be flowing. One of the major ones will be support for Persistent Volumes; which will open up many additional use-cases when it is released.
If you are looking for a more in-depth discussion; on April 19, Couchbase hosted a joint meetup titled: “Managing Business Critical Applications on Kubernetes with Couchbase Operator” with Google at Couchbase HQ in Mountain View, CA. In the session, we provided an in-depth overview of Kubernetes and the Couchbase Operator. Plus, we illustrated how Kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) can be accessed as a managed service through GKE. The video of the the meetup can be found here.
If you’d like to try out what we went over, we’ve created a walkthrough on Github. If you don’t already have a GCP account sign up; a new account is free and includes a $300 which credit which is more than enough to spin up a GKE cluster running the Couchbase Operator!
Learn more about the Couchbase and Google collaboration here.
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