Co-presented with Will Perry (@willpe). Real-world experiences using CouchDB inside Microsoft, and also how to get started with CouchDB on Microsoft Azure.

1. CouchDB at Microsoft
We’re running it in Azure, and so can you

2. Will Perry
@willpe
willpe@microsoft.com
Windows Azure Group
Brian Benz
@bbenz
bbenz@microsoft.com
Microsoft Open Tech

3.  An app we’ve built
 How we built it. Some tips and tricks
 Share some experience on helping folks get used to non-relational databases.
 Open Source at Microsoft
 Running CouchDB in Windows Azure

4. the app.
 Daylight – a test automation system for the cloud
 Stores metadata about every revision of every test case in our product
 About 10k tests updated about 6 times a day
 Stores details of test runs and results
 About 5k results stored 6 times a day
 100% in the cloud

6. the database.
Must haves:
 Scale to millions/billions of documents
 Fairly loose schema
 Not a single point of failure
 Multiple indexes – really fast access to docs
Nice to haves:
 Web friendly
 Aggregate oriented
 Http Interface
 Easily partitionable
SQL
TABLE
COUCH

7. CouchDB was the most natural fit
for the data we had
and the app we were building
…and the Apache 2.0 license helped keep the lawyers happy

8. the architecture.
Multi-node deployment with application server and couch db running on each node
and replicating across the deployment
Node 0
Load Balancer
Node 1 Node 2
VHD VHD VHD

9. time-partitioned data.
Mar-2013 Feb-2013Apr-2013 Jan-2013
Test data becomes exponentially less useful over time. Part of our scale strategy is
deleting old data in a ‘sliding-window’ fashion.

10. semi-static typing.
[JsonProperty("attributes")]
public JObject Attributes { get; set; }
[JsonProperty("full_name", Required = Required.Always)]
public string FullName { get; set; }
[JsonProperty("priority")]
public int Priority { get; set; }
Strong typing when we want it, loose typing when we don’t

11. http.
using (var httpClient = new HttpClient(couchBaseUri))
{
return await httpClient.GetAsync(resultId);
}
We didn’t feel the need to use a client library, and just extended the built-in http stack to
encapsulate some of our conventions

12. design documents.
 In the source tree
 Used a directory tree to map to the json tree
 Compile into a json document at start-up
 Compare to existing design doc and overwrite
if different

13. culture shock.
Map/Reduce != T-SQL
Help out SQL junkies by talking in terms of the index.

14. experience.
We really like CouchDB. It’s been really reliable, simple to manage and reduced our
implementation costs.
Sometimes indexing can slow us down and there’s a reasonable ramp-up required for
new devs on the project.
Overall, we’re confident we made the right choice.

15. Wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft
To advance Microsoft’s investment
in openness
Interoperability
Open source
Open standards

16. Windows Azure: What It Is
Flexible

17. Windows Azure
Virtual Machines
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2012
OpenSUSE 12.1
CentOS 6.2
Ubuntu 12.04
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server SP2

18. VM Depot
http://vmdepot.msopentech.com
 Call to action: Developers can use VM Depot to reach new
audiences!

19. Windows Azure: What It Is

21. Deployment
Complexity
Operational
Responsibility Flexibility OS Security
IaaS Some High High
Linux or
Windows
Custom
PaaS Some Low High
Windows
only
Built-in
SaaS Low/none
None
Limited N/A Built-in
What’s the Difference?

22. Virtual Machine Sizes
VM Size
CPU
Cores
Memory
Bandwidth
(Mbps)
# Data
Disks
Extra
Small
Shared 768 MB 5 1
Small 1 1.75 GB 100 2
Medium 2 3.5 GB 200 4
Large 4 7 GB 400 8
Extra
Large
8 14 GB 800 16

23. Supported Web Frameworks

24. Supported Publishing Methods

25. Windows Azure Developer Center
 Open-source SDKs for
popular programming
languages, to get you
up and running quickly
 Choice of popular IDEs
such as Visual Studio
and Eclipse
 Consistent REST protocols and APIs across Windows Azure
services
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/overview/
.NET driver
Node.js driver
Java driver
PHP driver
Python driver
Driver download page

28. azure topic verb options
Command Line Syntax Overview
prompt>
account
account location
account affinity-group
vm
vm disk
vm endpoint
vm image
service
service cert
site
config
download
import
list
show
delete
start
restart
shutdown
capture
create
attach
detach
browse
set
username
password
dns-prefix
vm-name
lb-port
target-image-name
source-path
disk-image-name
size-in-gb
thumbprint
value
-v
-vv

29. Example: Provisioning a Cluster
azure vm create couchsd "OpenLogic__OpenLogic-CentOS-62-20120531-
en-us-30GB.vhd" username password -l "West US" -e
azure vm create couchsd "OpenLogic__OpenLogic-CentOS-62-20120531-
en-us-30GB.vhd" username password -l "West US" -e 23 -c
azure vm create couchsd "OpenLogic__OpenLogic-CentOS-62-20120531-
en-us-30GB.vhd" username password -l "West US" -e 24 -c
azure vm endpoint create couchsd 27017 27017
azure vm endpoint create couchsd-2 27018 27018
azure vm endpoint create couchsd-3 27019 27019

31. Getting Started
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/
http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/WindowsAzureConf/2012/KEY01
Sign up for a free trial
Learn about the latest features

32. Will Perry
@willpe
willpe@microsoft.com
Windows Azure Group
Brian Benz
@bbenz
bbenz@microsoft.com
Microsoft Open Tech