OpenShift Commons Briefing: Using Apache CouchDB Operator for Data Portability - Josh Mintz and Will Holley (IBM)

Store your data safely, on your own servers, or with any leading cloud provider. Your web- and native applications love CouchDB, because it speaks JSON natively and supports binary data for all your data storage needs.

The Couch Replication Protocol lets your data flow seamlessly between server clusters to mobile phones and web browsers, enabling a compelling offline-first user-experience while maintaining high performance and strong reliability. CouchDB comes with a developer-friendly query language, and optionally MapReduce for simple, efficient, and comprehensive data retrieval.

Operator for Apache CouchDB Features

• Fully automated deployment and configuration of Apache CouchDB clusters.
• Support single, multiple, or all namespace install modes.

Security

• TLS – TLS is supported by using user-provided certificates.
• Authentication – The parameter require_valid_user defaults to true, which means that no requests are allowed from anonymous users. Every request must be authenticated.
• Authorization – Databases are initially accessible by Apache CouchDB admins only.

High Availability

• Nodes – Each database node in an Apache CouchDB cluster requires its own Kubernetes node. It’s recommended that you run it with a minimum of three nodes for any production deployment.
• Zones – The Apache CouchDB cluster database nodes are spread across available Kubernetes fault zones where available.
• Replicas – The default configuration for each database is eight shards (Q=8) and three shard copies (N=3), where each shard copy is deployed on a separate node in the cluster.

Reading and writing to Apache CouchDB

The Operator for Apache CouchDB automatically generates a Service. This can be accessed using port-forwarding e.g. kubectl port-forward svc/my-couchdb-cluster 5984:5984 -u admin:mypassword. Alternatively, configure a Kubernetes Ingress to expose the service externally.

Read the complete guide to using the Operator for Apache CouchDB

Here are the Briefing Slides. 

Additional Resources:

• Operator https://operatorhub.io/operator/couchdb-operator
• Documentation https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/services/Cloudant? topic=cloudant-apache-couchdb-operator
• What is Apache CouchDB https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=aOE90VAVOcU
• Apache CouchDB: Website https://couchdb.apache.org
  • Slack https://couchdb.apache.org/#chat
  • Git https://github.com/apache?q=couchdb

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Commons builds connections and collaboration across OpenShift communities, projects, and stakeholders. In doing so we’ll enable the success of customers, users, partners, and contributors as we deepen our knowledge and experiences together.

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