The convenience of convergence
I’ve been listening to the great Couchbase Connect sessions from October 14th-16th. The obvious one to listen to first, at least for me, is Ravi’s great keynote presentation, entitled “Donglemania: The convenience of convergence” .
One of the challenges of doing a keynote, especially around a deeply technical product, is that you need to be able to up-level the concepts behind the technology so that they are relatable. But even more importantly, you need to show why people should care about the product (besides the people who already work for Couchbase). Ravi starts off by talking about a problem that we can all relate to: donglemania — the mess of cables, connectors and standards that are part of the audio/visual hookups in our homes.
From there, he makes the obvious parallel between the evolving audio/visual standards, and last four decades of evolving database technology products and standards. Similar to our donglemania struggles at home, companies today struggle to make sense of the myriad of products, standards and connectors in order to build a complete, functional data management system. Enormous amounts of resources (time, people, hardware, software, and money) are spent, trying to tie together all of these disparate products. In the end, we often end up with something that works as long as no one tries to change it!
Ravi points out that Couchbase was architected to converge the various database technologies into a single platform using a single common data back plane, thereby providing all of that technology in an easy to deploy, scalable and reliable platform. Hence, convenience (and simplicity) through convergence of technology. Instead of spending resources cobbling things together, you can build applications that directly support the business’s goals and objectives.
But the second challenge of a good keynote, is to be able to speak to all of the audience, both the business and the technical types. The first half of the presentation is a great high level summary of the Couchbase platform. At this point, the business folks and architects are all nodding their heads. But many of the developers in the audience might start wondering, “Where’s the beef?”
Do not fear, ye intrepid coders, implementers, and database API wonks. In the second half of the keynote, Ravi dives into coding examples, using multiple languages and APIs, to demonstrate just how easy and flexible Couchbase is to use from the application developer perspective. He even previews an upcoming browser-based access and programming interface that automates database configuration, data loading, and creation of your own private Couchbase cloud instance. As a developer, you’re quickly presented with operational, query and programming dashboards that simplify coming up to speed on the product, enabling you to immediately try things out and generally make your life much easier.
Bottom line: If you’re looking for an architectural overview of Couchbase, plus an in-depth look at the API interfaces, this is a great presentation to start with!
