← Back to Blog

Deploying a CouchDB Cluster on Kubernetes: A Guide

Kubernetes has become the go-to solution for managing containerized applications at scale. CouchDB, a NoSQL database, is a perfect candidate for Kubernetes due to its distributed nature. This blog post will guide you through the process of deploying a CouchDB cluster on Kubernetes, ensuring your data is always available and scalable.
By Saturn Cloud | | Miscellaneous

Deploying a CouchDB Cluster on Kubernetes: A Guide

Kubernetes has become the go-to solution for managing containerized applications at scale. CouchDB, a NoSQL database, is a perfect candidate for Kubernetes due to its distributed nature. This blog post will guide you through the process of deploying a CouchDB cluster on Kubernetes, ensuring your data is always available and scalable.

What is CouchDB?

Apache CouchDB is a NoSQL 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. It’s designed with multi-master replication at its heart, which makes it an excellent choice for scaling out.

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes, also known as K8s, is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up an application into logical units for easy management and discovery.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, ensure you have the following:

  1. A Kubernetes cluster up and running.
  2. kubectl command-line tool installed and configured to interact with your cluster.
  3. Helm, the package manager for Kubernetes, installed on your machine.

Step 1: Install the CouchDB Helm Chart

Helm charts are packages of pre-configured Kubernetes resources. The official CouchDB Helm chart will set up a CouchDB cluster on your Kubernetes cluster. To install the chart, run:

helm repo add couchdb https://apache.github.io/couchdb-helm
helm install my-couchdb couchdb/couchdb

Step 2: Configure the CouchDB Cluster

The CouchDB Helm chart comes with sensible defaults. However, you might want to customize the configuration to suit your needs. You can do this by creating a values.yaml file:

clusterSize: 3
persistentVolume:
  size: 10Gi

Then, apply the configuration:

helm upgrade my-couchdb couchdb/couchdb -f values.yaml

Step 3: Accessing the CouchDB Cluster

Once the CouchDB cluster is up and running, you can access it using the kubectl port-forward command:

kubectl port-forward svc/my-couchdb 5984:5984

Now, you can access the CouchDB Fauxton interface at http://localhost:5984/_utils.

Step 4: Scaling the CouchDB Cluster

Scaling the CouchDB cluster is as simple as changing the clusterSize value in the values.yaml file and applying the configuration:

helm upgrade my-couchdb couchdb/couchdb -f values.yaml

Conclusion

Deploying a CouchDB cluster on Kubernetes is a straightforward process thanks to Helm. With just a few commands, you can have a scalable, distributed NoSQL database up and running. This setup is perfect for applications that require high availability and scalability.

Remember, while this guide provides a basic setup, you should adjust the configuration to suit your specific needs, especially when deploying in a production environment.

Keywords

  • CouchDB
  • Kubernetes
  • Helm
  • NoSQL database
  • CouchDB cluster
  • Kubernetes cluster
  • Helm chart
  • CouchDB Helm chart
  • Deploying CouchDB on Kubernetes
  • Scaling CouchDB
  • High availability
  • Scalability
  • Distributed NoSQL database
  • Production environment

Meta Description

Learn how to deploy a scalable, distributed CouchDB cluster on a Kubernetes cluster using Helm. This guide is perfect for data scientists looking to scale their NoSQL databases.

About Saturn Cloud

Saturn Cloud is your all-in-one solution for data science & ML development, deployment, and data pipelines in the cloud. Spin up a notebook with 4TB of RAM, add a GPU, connect to a distributed cluster of workers, and more. Join today and get 150 hours of free compute per month.

Try Saturn Cloud Now