Couchbase today added an edition of its database, dubbed Couchbase Edge Server, that is specifically designed to be deployed at the network edge.
Matt McDonough, senior vice president for product and partners at Couchbase, said that as more data is being processed and analyzed at the point where it is being created and consumed, the need to reduce application latency is requiring more IT teams to deploy applications at the edge of their networks.
The document database developed by Couchbase provides a lightweight approach to enabling organizations to build and deploy those types of stateful applications on IT platforms that are usually resource constrained in terms of available memory, he added.
In the absence of a database running at the network edge, IT teams deploying applications at the network edge would need to access databases residing in a data center or cloud service over a wide area network (WAN) that would add too much latency, noted McDonough.
That additional latency makes it challenging to, for example, deploy an artificial intelligence (AI) model that is supposed to drive an interactive user experience at the network edge, said McDonough. In fact, a recent Couchbase survey finds nearly two-thirds of respondents (65%) view edge computing capabilities as being critical for generative AI applications. Couchbase Edge Server includes vector processing capabilities that are needed to run these type of AI applications.
Couchbase Edge Server is built on the Couchbase Lite core engine, a document database specifically designed to run on embedded systems that have as little as 1GB of RAM on a single board computer. It is also designed to provide real-time data synchronization across multiple edge services in addition to REST application programming interface (API) integrations with the managed Couchbase Capella cloud service or any self-managed instance of Couchbase that has been deployed by an internal IT team.
Additionally, all communications between databases are encrypted to protect data in flight.
It’s not clear how many applications are being deployed at the network edge, but modern applications increasingly require an ability to process data in real time versus relying on batch-oriented processes to update a remote database. As a result, the types of databases needed to support applications running at the network edge are evolving. Application developers still require databases that make it simpler to build these applications, but the level of data synchronization that needs to be achieved and maintained is now significantly greater. Many of the legacy databases historically deployed at the network edge don’t provide those capabilities.
Regardless of approach, edge computing is transforming how IT environments are managed and secured. The number of platforms that IT teams are now remotely managing across a distributed computing environment using DevOps workflows is exponentially increasing.
The challenge, as always, is finding a way to build and deploy applications on those platforms without necessarily increasing the number of IT administrators that might be required at a time when most organizations are looking to contain the total cost of IT as much as possible.
