The year end is once again upon us, the perfect time to celebrate what we’ve accomplished together as a community of developers. This wrap reel is not designed to be complete, but rather to cherry pick some highlights. Our developer community continues to grow, and we are in awe of what you build. We are here to engage with you, to innovate in our product, run and contribute to events, and serve our customers. 2025 is gearing up to be another great year for Couchbase.

Product highlights

In the age of AI, Couchbase led the way this year in making our developer data platform for critical AI applications. It’s packed full of new AI features, with much more besides.

    • Capella on Azure – At the start of the year, we announced Azure support for Capella, true to our mission is to make Capella more accessible for developers and teams. By extending Capella to Azure, organizations can use Capella across all three major cloud providers and have the flexibility to support their multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies. Read more about our partnership with Microsoft.
    • Capella iQ  – Our AI-powered coding assistant, iQ, reached GA in January. It’s integrated in many places across our product, available in IDEs, and recently took on more superpowers with Capella iQ Insights.
    • Capella Columnar – Capella Columnar addresses the challenge of parsing, transforming and persisting JSON data into an analysis-ready columnar format. It supports real-time, multi-source ingestion of data not only from Couchbase, but also using common systems like Kafka to draw data from other third party JSON or SQL databases.
    • Capella Free Tier – At Couchbase, we are dedicated to removing blockers and creating cutting edge solutions for developers to create the next generation of applications across IoT to AI, and beyond. Now, with the addition of Capella Free Tier and social sign-on, we are making it faster and easier for developers to get hands on.
    • Vector and Hybrid Search – Couchbase was the first vendor to support vector search across our product line; on-prem, cloud and mobile. Read more about vector and hybrid search.
    • Capella AI Services – Rounding out an action-packed year, Capella AI Services helps customers build AI-powered applications in a more simplified, streamlined, performant and secure way. We know that many organizations have started exploring and building test applications with AI, but most of those projects are not brought to production due to concerns with privacy, hallucinations, cost, and ongoing management. Our Capella AI Services are designed to overcome many of these challenges.

DevEx – tools and integrations

There were many developer experience improvements and devtool innovations, whether rolled into the product or existing in the wider ecosystem to make developers more productive. Here are just some of the highlights:

    • Artificial Intelligence: With the acceleration of features in the core product, we also worked hard on building a number of integrations with other AI services. These include AWS Bedrock, Gemini, Langchain, Vectorize, and more.
    • The Capella Terraform Provider, currently at v1.4.0, is a powerful way of programmatically managing Capella API keys, users, organizations, projects, clusters, buckets, and other resources.
    • Couchbase Shell 1.0 has been reached after 4 years of development. It’s a powerful command-line tool built on top of nushell designed to make your interactions with Couchbase easier and more efficient.
    • Couchbase Lite for Ionic Capacitor (PREVIEW) is a plugin implementation using Typescript. It has feature parity with Couchbase Lite implementations for other platforms, with a few exceptions.
    • React Native Plugin for Couchbase Lite (PREVIEW) is a couchbase community supported version of Native Module implementation of Couchbase Lite for React Native using Typescript. It has feature parity with Couchbase Lite implementations for other platforms, with a few exceptions.
    • Capella Data Studio matured, reached version 1.0, and is getting better all the time. Read about 10 Cool Features Every Developer Should Know.
    • Couchbase and Solace have partnered to create a seamless integration between Solace’s event-driven messaging platform and Couchbase’s high-performance NoSQL database, Capella DBaaS or Couchbase Server.
    • Apache Flink connector Beta is a set of Source and Sink classes that can be used to read and write JSON documents to a Couchbase cluster.
    • Our IDE plugins continue to be enhanced with new features that allow developers to interact with Couchbase in your dev environment. Check out our JetBrains and VSCode plugins.

There are more tools to explore on our integrations page, be sure to visit!

Customer stories

Helping customers build applications that bring value to their business is at the core of everything we do. They constantly surprise and delight us with how they use Couchbase and the associated wins. Here is a selection of customer profiles from this year across different industries.

Trendyol is a global leader e-commerce platform that connects more than 250,000 sellers and brands with over 40 million customers on dedicated local language apps in multiple countries. Couchbase enables easy and cost-effective scaling without sacrificing high performance, it provides data storage and processing that spans clusters, regions, and cloud providers. Additionally Couchbase’s flexible JSON schema and familiar SQL++ enable developers to use their existing skill sets

Rakuten offers services in e-commerce, fintech, digital content, and communications to 1.8 billion members around the world. The Rakuten Group has more than 30,000 employees, and operations in 30 countries and regions. For Rakuten, Couchbase ensures nearly 100% availability, low read latency, and data backups. By consolidating databases, Rakuten enhanced cost-efficiency and reduced TCO by 20%. Ultimately, Couchbase’s multipurpose database, SQL for JSON, and rich features increased capabilities while reducing complexity.

Quickplay Media is the industry leader in over-the-top (OTT) cloud transformations for sports, media, and entertainment across 10+ markets. Quickplay required a database that could handle sudden spikes in traffic amidst massive amounts of unexpected user demand and is now able to scale while maintaining peak performance with Couchbase’s network-centric architecture. Couchbase enables a fast, personalized experience for millions of subscribers with 100% uptime. The database easily scales to thousands of queries per minute (typically 30-75K) and maintains an under 5-second app start time.

SWARM Engineering provides a SaaS platform that lets organizations in the agri-food industry optimize their supply chains using next-gen cognitive computing. For SWARM, Couchbase enables quick SQL implementation, unlimited scalability, fast prototype development, and allows data scientists to access all data from one place. Customers achieve 400% faster planning time with an average ROI of 3-10x. An AI-powered digital assistant interviews users to capture tribal knowledge, constraints, and key interdependencies, and helps users identify and benchmark critical challenges.

Wibmo is an industry leader in payment security and digital payments in emerging markets and India’s largest authentication service provider. Wibmo offers fraud and risk management solutions, mobile payments, prepaid solutions, and a host of merchant-acquiring services. Couchbase’s highly reliable in-memory database significantly boosted performance. It scales quickly and easily for both business growth and spikes in demand. Ultimately, Couchbase’s flexible NoSQL database makes it easier to address diverse and evolving requirements.

Check out these other customer stories on the Couchbase blog.

Events

Events for developers were back with a bang this year, and we were there to make things happen! We deliver events for customers, developers, investors, and other audiences. We support third party events where we show up to provide value to the other communities. In 2024 we doubled down on virtual community events and DevRel streams for wider reach and to provide opportunities for a broader audience.

Meetups

This year, we participated in over 70 developer meetups. We partnered with a number of ranging from partners like AWS User Groups and Google Developer Groups, to Python communities and other language groups, and hosting a number of our own in multiple cities including London, Bangalore, Tel Aviv, Zurich, and Vancouver. The highlight reel would stretch far for these events, but here are a just a couple.

In August we were delighted to be present at the Nordic Software AI Hackathon organized by Cillers. Couchbase was part of the core tech stack for the event, and we were very impressed with the applications that the teams built.

In November we conducted a hack day at our Bengaluru office in collaboration with Cloudflare. Instead of a typical meetup, the event attendees were required to build projects with Couchbase vector search (using Free Tier) and Cloudflare for 3 hours and present their demos at the end of the hackday. We had a total of 60 people turn up for the event. In this hybrid format, initially we had presentations on Cloudflare workers and Couchbase Vector Search. Later everyone moved to the office space to spend the next 2.5 hours building projects.

Developer conferences

As an organization, we focus on events large and small. We want to reach our customers, other developers building with Couchbase, and of course to raise awareness among new audiences. One of the best ways to do the latter is of course through larger conferences and tradeshows. We participated all across the globe this year, here are a few highlights.

WeAreDevelopers World Congress

WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin is one of the largest developer conferences in Europe, boasting a top-notch lineup of speakers who are at the forefront of technology and innovation. In a true team effort, the DevRel and Community teams were there to work with Field Marketing and Sales to work at the Couchbase booth, and Gregor Bauer gave a well received talk “GraphQL: Does it Replace SQL, REST or Something Else?”. The popcorn proved to be very popular!

GIDS

Great International Developer Summit (GIDS) 2025 is Asia’s premier polyglot software conference and expo. In 2024 it reached over 6,000 attendees and Couchbase was there to meet developers. Our DevRel in the region, Shivay Lamba, gave a talk on vector search.

Virtual events

Once again our Marketing team has been busy all year putting out webcasts on a number of different topics. Our Sales org runs in-person and virtual Couchbase Capella workshops for our customers globally, and we expanded the reach this year with Capella Test Drives, our FREE hands-on course for developers. In just 90 minutes with a dedicated instructor, you’ll learn everything you need to get started on Couchbase Capell and kick off your Couchbase certification journey. There are more upcoming, so be sure to sign up.

We put out various community virtual events and DevRel streams showcasing technologies and will continue to do so in 2025. Be sure to keep an eye on our YouTube channel, where you can find them organized into handy playlists. Our streams go live on LinkedIn and X as well, so be sure to follow us to get notified.

All things certification

How does your certification count look? Is your LinkedIn missing a few badges? Looking for ways to show off your coding skills? Want credit for learning more about Couchbase? In 2024, all our online courses were updated to include Couchbase Capella Free Tier as well as the Vector Search and generative AI advancements within Couchbase databases. So far the Top Companies to earn Couchbase certifications in 2024 are: IBM, TCS, Accenture, Varmeego, and ESDS.

Looking for Mobile Application content? Check out our new and improved CB140a: Android Mobile Developer Certification. And just in time for the holidays, we’ll be publishing our first ever CB130p: Couchbase Associate Python Developer Course and Certification Exam on December 20, 2024! With Python maintaining popularity, we didn’t want Python experts to feel left out. We’ve also upgraded CB131: Associate Architect Certification to include Python code examples! Find out more and get in touch via the Couchbase Academy webpage. 

Community highlights

Ambassadors

Our ambassador program is growing steadily both in terms of the number of members and in the impact that they have. We are very lucky to have a great group of Couchbase experts and enthusiasts. The program has grown to 27 active Ambassadors in 14 countries.

Here are just few highlights from ambassador activity this year:

    • We are holding exclusive sessions for Ambassadors on a monthly basis, focusing on technical and soft skills development
    • Our new ambassadors webpage was launched, with information on the program and profiles of ambassadors who opt-in
    • Simon Owesu, on behalf of his employer PVH, took to the stage at the annual Couchbase Sales Kick-Off in Nashville in January
    • Ambassadors have participated at conferences and other events with us, including Sigal Shaharabani at co-hosting and speaking at a meetup and Curt Gratz talking to attendees at RubyConf about Couchbase
    • Sigal wrote a post on our blog, From Concept to Code: LLM + RAG with Couchbase
    • Ambassadors join the conversion and provide community support on our forums and Discord. Big shoutout to Brant Burnett for his commitment!

 

To apply or to refer someone, head on over to the ambassadors page.

Build

Our community is building some cool things, here are just some projects:

Do you want to build with Couchbase? The best way to get started is to sign up for Capella Free Tier and then head over to the Couchbase Developer portal.

Wrapping up

Thank you for choosing to come on this journey with this. We can’t say for sure what the future will bring, however check out these well informed predictions from Laurent Doguin, our Head of DevRel at Couchbase.

Couchbase is a thriving developer community. Join us to have your questions answered, tell us your stories of building with Couchbase, nurture your speaking and leadership skills, or maybe even to make some friends!

See you in 2025!



 

Author

Posted by Brian King, Senior Community Manager

With a software development background, Brian has two decades of experience working with communities in the open Web (Mozilla), talent networks (Toptal), open source (Eclipse Foundation), and more. With his team and the organization as a whole he is focused growing the Couchbase developer community and improving the developer experience in order to help build better products.

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