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CouchDB vs Serverless: What are the differences?
CouchDB: HTTP + JSON document database with Map Reduce views and peer-based replication. Apache CouchDB is a database that uses JSON for documents, JavaScript for MapReduce indexes, and regular HTTP for its API. CouchDB is a database that completely embraces the web. Store your data with JSON documents. Access your documents and query your indexes with your web browser, via HTTP. Index, combine, and transform your documents with JavaScript; Serverless: The most widely-adopted toolkit for building serverless applications. Build applications comprised of microservices that run in response to events, auto-scale for you, and only charge you when they run. This lowers the total cost of maintaining your apps, enabling you to build more logic, faster. The Framework uses new event-driven compute services, like AWS Lambda, Google CloudFunctions, and more.
CouchDB can be classified as a tool in the "Databases" category, while Serverless is grouped under "Serverless / Task Processing".
"JSON" is the top reason why over 42 developers like CouchDB, while over 10 developers mention "API integration " as the leading cause for choosing Serverless.
CouchDB and Serverless are both open source tools. Serverless with 30.9K GitHub stars and 3.43K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than CouchDB with 4.24K GitHub stars and 835 GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Serverless has a broader approval, being mentioned in 117 company stacks & 44 developers stacks; compared to CouchDB, which is listed in 61 company stacks and 32 developer stacks.
We implemented our first large scale EPR application from naologic.com using CouchDB .
Very fast, replication works great, doesn't consume much RAM, queries are blazing fast but we found a problem: the queries were very hard to write, it took a long time to figure out the API, we had to go and write our own @nodejs library to make it work properly.
It lost most of its support. Since then, we migrated to Couchbase and the learning curve was steep but all worth it. Memcached indexing out of the box, full text search works great.
When adding a new feature to Checkly rearchitecting some older piece, I tend to pick Heroku for rolling it out. But not always, because sometimes I pick AWS Lambda . The short story:
- Developer Experience trumps everything.
- AWS Lambda is cheap. Up to a limit though. This impact not only your wallet.
- If you need geographic spread, AWS is lonely at the top.
Recently, I was doing a brainstorm at a startup here in Berlin on the future of their infrastructure. They were ready to move on from their initial, almost 100% Ec2 + Chef based setup. Everything was on the table. But we crossed out a lot quite quickly:
- Pure, uncut, self hosted Kubernetes — way too much complexity
- Managed Kubernetes in various flavors — still too much complexity
- Zeit — Maybe, but no Docker support
- Elastic Beanstalk — Maybe, bit old but does the job
- Heroku
- Lambda
It became clear a mix of PaaS and FaaS was the way to go. What a surprise! That is exactly what I use for Checkly! But when do you pick which model?
I chopped that question up into the following categories:
- Developer Experience / DX 🤓
- Ops Experience / OX 🐂 (?)
- Cost 💵
- Lock in 🔐
Read the full post linked below for all details
Pros of CouchDB
- JSON43
- Open source30
- Highly available18
- Partition tolerant12
- Eventual consistency11
- Sync7
- REST API5
- Attachments mechanism to docs4
- Multi master replication4
- Changes feed3
- REST interface1
- js- and erlang-views1
Pros of Serverless
- API integration12
- Supports cloud functions for Google, Azure, and IBM7
- Lower cost2
- Openwhisk1
- Auto scale1