A Fresher Couchbase Capella Developer Experience
As the world around us becomes smarter and more connected, the end-user expectations for application experience, integrated functionality, performance and availability have skyrocketed. This creates a problem when organizations attempt to weave together multiple different data technologies to build premium experience apps for their customers, which in turn creates complexity for developers. When did building a next-gen app get so complicated?! How come cloud development tools can’t behave more like GitHub?
We’ve had our eyes on this challenge and understand the market need to simplify the developer experience in Couchbase Capella. Beyond listening to the market in general, we as always listen closely to our customers and community who are similarly telling us that they don’t just want a better database – they want an easier to use database. Anything that we can do to remove friction for developers to increase their agility and productivity with Capella is a win-win for us to address the $62B+ database market opportunity.
We understood the market need and therefore today we are excited to announce an overhaul of the Capella developer experience for our Fall release. It is fresh and exciting– no tricks, just treats! This release expects to make Capella easier to use, better looking, more flexible, more secure and faster than ever before. Developers should be able to work faster, add more data platform-powered capabilities to their applications, and potentially reduce their operating costs all at once. In a nutshell, here’s what is new:
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- Enhanced the Capella Developer Experience by bringing forward everyday developer tasks, adopting a layout style that is already familiar to most developers, and cleaning up its branding.
- Incorporated the latest features found in Couchbase Enterprise Edition including the High-Data Density storage engine, Magma. Plus we added the Tableau data connector for business intelligence analysts, plus user defined functions, and made it more secure.
- We conform to both SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA regulations for managing data services and handling sensitive data.
- We opened the Couchbase Developer Community Hub and introduced the Ambassador Program.
Capella is easier for developers, faster and more secure for DevOps, while lowering your operating costs significantly. Our customer from BroadJump, Phil Lupercio is saving over 50% in his storage costs just by switching to Magma, for example.
What the Couchbase Capella Developer Experience Means to Developers
Our analyst friend, Stephen O’Grady from Redmonk reminded us to keep things as simple and streamlined for developers because their toolbox is already full enough. And when we surveyed developers at our customers, we were reminded that their favorite feature of Couchbase was the familiarity of our query language, SQL++ (formerly named N1QL). Looking at specific changes to the Capella developer experience, you’ll notice the following:
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- A GitHub-like layout to the user interface, helping developers feel at home.
- Fingertip access to Capella documentation, the Couchbase Playground, and built-in tutorials including the SQL++ interactive query tutorial.
- A Quick Start dashboard page that provides navigation to the Query Workbench, Import tools, App Services tolls, the SQL++ tutorial and to your favorite SDK.
- Easy to use menu navigation that includes Data Tools, App Services, Backup and Settings for your cluster.
- Couchbase Capella branding that features the dual stars that comprise Capella, the brightest spot of the constellation Auriga.
These enhancements are expected to improve developer productivity and agility, while elevating Capella capabilities to create innovative applications. Check back frequently as we add more graphics to help you familiarize yourself with these enhancements.
Capella adds Couchbase Magma, the high data-density storage engine
Magma is the Couchbase database’s internal storage engine introduced in 2022. Magma was featured at the VLDB 2022 conference. And was very well received in this great technical review.
Capella now offers a choice of storage engines, Couchstore and Magma. Magma is a new design that optimizes memory consumption and minimizes write amplification when documents are changing frequently. The use of this engine expands cluster node capacity to 10 TB, and improves memory consumption requirements by 90%. Magma is an excellent choice for larger databases and systems where documents mutate frequently.
Capella adds Tableau Support for Analytics
Capella also supports new analytic functionality by adding a native connector for Tableau. This allows Tableau users to access active data within Capella, via the analytics service.
Capella adds security measures and support for industry standard regulations
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- SOC 2 Type II operational controls. Capella has undergone and passed a months long audit to demonstrate that its operations conform to the controls specified by SOC 2 Type II.
- HiPAA Compliance Capella has also added numerous security-related features and completed its security review for supporting medical and health insurance-related data. Customers can now obtain a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) letter from Couchbase. Each of these additions is designed to both expand the types of applications and organizations who can confidently do business with Couchbase.
Capella also adds support for AWS PrivateLinks and single sign-on via Okta and Azure Active Directory.
Read our Security and Controls White Paper
Expanded Developer Community Outreach
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- Our Couchbase Developer Community resources are expanded by the roll-out of the Couchbase Community Hub to complement our Couchbase Discord Server and the Community Forum.
- We have also introduced the Ambassador Program for Couchbase advocates. The program provides tools and resources to empower ambassadors to speak at events, organize community meetups and create content to grow the Couchbase community.
Summary of Capella Developer Experience Release
The Capella Fall release is available for preview by contacting your Couchbase Account Manager. We are excited to show you the fresh Capella Developer Experience, and look forward to your feedback and ongoing support. We are confident that you will see that Capella has become easier, better looking, more flexible, more secure and faster than ever before.
