We pride ourselves on the fact that some of the world’s largest companies rely on Couchbase every day to tackle critical use cases for their most important applications. At the same time, we know that not every application starts off as mission-critical. There is of course a lot of space between a minimal viable product and an application that is vital to your organization’s success.

The Purpose of Community Edition (CE)

Our Community Edition of Couchbase Server was designed for teams to get started with Couchbase and handle more simple use cases. It’s great for what it is, but CE is not intended for enterprise application scaling requirements, which is why the license limits cluster size to five nodes. That said, some customers have built very fast, in-memory processing applications on top of CE and then grown those applications in ways that really push the boundaries of what CE should do. This may not have been the plan, but sometimes things grow in unexpected ways and you just have to move quickly with what you have in place. And we get it; CE is free, which is always a nice price when you are trying to keep costs down. But let’s face it, as those CE-based applications have grown in importance, they don’t get access to our Support team. Additionally, they don’t get access to Enterprise Edition (EE) features which can be limiting in terms of scalability, availability, and performance. And like any downloadable database, CE has to be managed (Updates, back-ups, upgrades,…), which becomes more challenging as the application scales. And be mindful that CE does not undergo the same “test, fix, and verify” quality assurance cycles as EE. Fortunately for the community, CE is a high quality product, but we don’t know what issues will pop up out of the blue…

Capella Provides a Ton of Value

With the launch of Couchbase Capella, our fully managed and hosted database-as-a-service, we have seen strong interest from organizations that have applications built upon CE. Why? Because as applications grow in scope and become more important to the business, they need more help supporting them. Capella delivers a tremendous amount of value and provides an affordable and smart way for customers to move beyond CE.

With Capella, organizations get:

  • Enterprise features: Clusters larger than five nodes, multidimensional scaling (scale individual services to align with your performance needs), automated replication across datacenters (automated active-active replication across clusters around the globe), real-time analytics (gain business value on operational data without ETL slowdowns), and server-side eventing (trigger user-defined business logic in real-time), and much more
  • Live Support: Capella customers gain direct access to our support team for their applications and specific use cases, instead of gathering information manually by searching our forums
  • Large management effort reductions: Capella takes away the management heavy lifting as a fully managed database-as-a-service. Things like infrastructure set up and monitoring, node additions and rebalancing, managing backups, upgrades, monitoring, recovering instances, automating security, and the list goes on and on.
  • Surprisingly affordable: We have great starter options for customers to begin with Capella, like on-demand credits and discounted Starter Kits, which bundle usage credits, professional service offerings, and developer certification vouchers

When you combine all of these aspects, it’s clear to see that Capella will help organizations to improve management, security, performance, and availability of their applications originally deployed with Couchbase Server Community Edition.

Is Capella Your Next Best Move?

You can try it out for free and see how easy it is. 

If you want to do a deeper dive test drive with Capella, you can reach out to our team and we can set you up.

Want to learn more first, sure:

Capella Starter Kits

 

Author

Posted by Tim Rottach, Director of Product Line Marketing

One Comment

  1. So sad to see that literally none of my feedback has been listened to. CE was NEVER stated as not being for enterprise applications from 2.0 to 6.5. This is just shameful to see more of this marketing speak after I specifically pointed out how terribly written the announcement post for the 5 node limit was. Though is good to know the real reason CB decided to screw over their community users.

Leave a reply