Ratnopam Chakrabarti hails from Plano, Texas and is an AWS Certified Solution Architect at Ericsson. He has been actively involved in contributing to our our Community writing program sharing off his expertise on Couchbase.
Tell us about yourself and what you do in your daily role?
I am a solution architect by profession. I love to use and explore new technologies such as Couchbase, Docker, and AWS. As part of my job, I design and develop customized software solutions using a blend of technologies and frameworks. My recent projects have been in the connected car, smart home, and IoT domains. My keen interest lies in all things related to cloud computing, containers, microservices, and serverless technologies.
Where are you based and what do you like to do in your spare time?
I am based out of Plano, TX. In my spare time, I try to learn new things and apply them to tangible use cases (however small they may be) because I feel that’s the best way to explore any new subject. I like to write blogs, attend meetups and conference events, and read about other people’s work – including the challenges they faced and the solution they came up with to solve a problem. I am also a self-learner and am always eager to upgrade my skills.
What made you choose Couchbase?
For one of my projects, I was looking at options for syncing data between a mobile device and a server hosted in a cloud. It was during that research when I first came to know about Couchbase and its features. I thought it was pretty amazing for a NoSQL product like Couchbase to have such a cool feature to offer. To me, some of the best Couchbase features include: – Mobile Couchbase lite with Sync Gateway that allows an app to work in offline mode
- Ease of management from the administration GUI
- Ability to act as a JSON document database and caching engine at the same time with great performance
- Ability to query JSON using N1QL
What have you accomplished using Couchbase?
I have used Couchbase as a back-end NoSQL database in my applications; these applications are based on frameworks like Spring Boot, Vaadin, Node.js, and AWS. Using Couchbase SKDs for both Java and Node.js, I created apps which leverage extensive N1QL querying, Full Text Search, and are fully Dockerized. I also plan to use Couchbase in IoT-related use cases because I feel IoT is a natural fit for Couchbase – a product covering both the cloud and the device side.
What one feature of Couchbase do you use and what should people know about it?
Couchbase can also be used as a caching layer in any enterprise application. The Couchbase cache is super fast and uses the memcached protocol, which is one of the most widely used caching mechanisms.
If you could have three wishes for Couchbase what would they be?
- Offer a cloud-hosted SaaS offering of Couchbase Server (much like Atlas from MongoDB)
- Data compression to comply with very high volumes of data (petabytes)
- Continue to involve and grow developer community work through seminars, meetups, and hackathon events
What is your favorite book or author, and why?
“Release It!” by Michael Nygard for a brilliant manifestation of how to design production ready software. “Domain-Driven Design” by Eric Evans for demonstrating how to design object-oriented domain models that can solve business problems.
