Couchbase Offers New Hosted Database-As-A-Service Option On AWS

Couchbase Capella, based on the next-generation Couchbase database, gives customers and partners a way to more quickly spin up a cloud database for developing mission-critical applications.

Couchbase is expanding the deployment options for its next-generation database, launching a hosted database-as-a-service on Amazon Web Services that the company said will make it faster and easier for developers to build enterprise applications.

The new offering, Couchbase Capella, is a fully managed and automated cloud database that Couchbase touts as providing the most flexibility for developers and performance-at-scale for enterprise applications.

Because Capella runs in Couchbase’s own cloud account on AWS, rather than in a customer’s AWS account, Couchbase said the hosted option provides more convenience by leaving more account management chores to Couchbase.

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Couchbase Server is a distributed NoSQL database, one of a new generation of database systems that are challenging mainstream relational database products from companies like Oracle and Microsoft.

“We’re really excited about this hosted solution and making our database-as-a-service offering much more accessible to a broader range of users,” said Scott Anderson, senior vice president of product management at Couchbase, in an interview with CRN.

Anderson said the new hosted database is a more convenient – and potentially faster – deployment option for customers because it runs within a Couchbase account on AWS and is inclusive of the database server infrastructure and management. Customers are billed for everything from Couchbase only.

“In our hosted model, what you are doing is purchasing everything from Couchbase. The database server, the underlying infrastructure and the management capabilities,” Anderson said.

Couchbase also announced the availability of a Capella free trial for developers, along with 50 Gbytes of storage, that allows them to quickly get started developing applications on the cloud database.

“It always starts with developers,” Anderson said of the focus on meeting the needs of application programmers.

Couchbase Capella is based on Couchbase Server 7, the latest edition of the company’s flagship database that became generally available on July 29.

The Couchbase Server database fuses relational database functionality like SQL query support and distributed ACID transactions with the flexibility of a modern JSON document database, according to the company.

Couchbase launched Couchbase Cloud, its first database-as-a-service offering, in June 2020. Unlike the new hosted deployment option, Couchbase Cloud runs in a virtual private cloud on AWS and Microsoft Azure within a customer’s AWS or Azure account. Anderson said some customers prefer that option because it gives them more management control and provides some performance and cost advantages.

“It’s really about providing deployment options for customers,” Anderson said.

Couchbase also said it is rebranding Couchbase Cloud under the Capella umbrella name.

The hosted Couchbase Capella can be deployed for multi-cluster, multi-region and multi-cloud operations, according to the company. The database-as-a-service offers data structure flexibility for developing operational, transactional and analytical applications and provides developers with multi-modal capabilities including document, key-value, full text search and analytics.

“When developing for clients, we need flexibility, high performance and cost-effective solutions,” said Scott Bradley, principal engineer at Facet Digital, a Kirkland, Wash.-based application strategy, design and development agency that uses Couchbase. “Couchbase Capella is a single platform that gives us JSON document agility, in-memory caching speeds, text search and analytics, all accessed via the SQL our team already knows,” Bradley said in a statement.

The hosted Couchbase Capella control plane is built on AWS and integrates more than 20 AWS services including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Elastic Book Store, AWS Lambda, Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Shield, Couchbase said. Developers can connect applications with AWS services such as Amazon S3, AWS Fargate and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service.

Couchbase Capella is being sold directly from Couchbase as well as through cloud marketplaces and the company’s channel partners, including resellers and systems integrators.

“We have a broad reseller community for Couchbase Server and our mobile solution today and this is an additional offering that they have the opportunity to sell and provide services around from a consulting perspective and a value-add perspective via building new applications or migrating existing applications to this service,” Anderson said.

Anderson said hosted editions of Couchbase Capella are being developed for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform with availability likely in 2022.