Hosting Preference

[Jeff Charette]

What is your CouchDB host preference? Here has been my experience which leaves me as a loss for hosted services.

Cloudant
- doesn't support newest couch techniques like require and I can't find a tutorial to port my couch app.

Iriscouch (currently using)
- I have nothing but love for these guys, but have had a lot of issues lately. I've requested an upgrade with no response unfortunetly.
- they are on 1.2.1 which would be great, but 1.2.1 has a big issue which has been fixed for 1.2.2
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-1651

Others ?

I like the idea of supporting a hosted service, but find myself looking to setup my own.

Jeff Charette | Principal
We Are Charette
web / identity / packaging

m 415.298.2707
w wearecharette.com
e jef...@wearecharette.com

[Jan Lehnardt]

On Mar 11, 2013, at 20:01 , Jeff Charette <iom...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> What is your CouchDB host preference? Here has been my experience which leaves me as a loss for hosted services.
>
> Cloudant
> - doesn't support newest couch techniques like require and I can't find a tutorial to port my couch app.
>
> Iriscouch (currently using)
> - I have nothing but love for these guys, but have had a lot of issues lately. I've requested an upgrade with no response unfortunetly.
> - they are on 1.2.1 which would be great, but 1.2.1 has a big issue which has been fixed for 1.2.2
> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-1651

1.2.2 is not a release yet. We don’t recommend hosters run pre-release versions :)

Cheers
Jan
--

[Robert Newson]

fwiw: require() (aka CommonJS) should land this week or next. It's
been stalled for ages because we needed a zero downtime upgrade path.

B.

[Lance Carlson]

I ran into the very same issue and started hosting it myself. Digital Ocean
is nice.

[Lance Carlson]

Actually, cloudant doesn't have the rewrite bug. Once they get the security
features from 1.2.x I'll be back. :)

[Jeff Charette]

> fwiw: require() (aka CommonJS) should land this week or next. It's
> been stalled for ages because we needed a zero downtime upgrade path.

That is exciting news, what release will this be?

> 1.2.2 is not a release yet. We don’t recommend hosters run pre-release versions :)

I totally get that, unfortunely latest stable dies after 3 requests in a row. Died in a demo today, sooooo fun :)
FYI, my upgrade request was for the premium service not for 1.2.2.

> I ran into the very same issue and started hosting it myself. Digital Ocean is nice.

Checking out digital ocean now, looks good.

> Actually, cloudant doesn't have the rewrite bug. Once they get the security features from 1.2.x I'll be back. :)

me too

Thanks Jan, Robert, and Lance

Jeff Charette | Principal
We Are Charette
web / identity / packaging

m 415.298.2707
w wearecharette.com
e jef...@wearecharette.com

[Robert Newson]

I think Jan means that there isn't a 1.2.2 release yet, he's just
correcting your terminology. A build from the tip of 1.2.x includes
the rewrite bug fix but it is emphatically *not* 1.2.2. There's a
release process to follow.

B.

[Noah Slater]

I will kick off a 1.2.2 release once I get a few other things off my plate.

--
NS

[Lance Carlson]

Thx Noah! This would be huge. Will this be updated on the site as
well? What about Ubuntu repos too?

Sent from my iPhone

[Robert Newson]

Ubuntu (etc) can backport the fix to their 1.2.1 packages any time
they like, they should not need an official release.

B.

[Noah Slater]

Lance, yes, we'll update the site when the release goes out.

You can also subscribe to the release announcements list by sending an
email to:

announce-...@couchdb.apache.org

--
NS

[Jeff Charette]

How do you pass authentication to an outside process? Is there a way to do this with headers?

My use case is to use externals to pass an already authenticated request directly to node then have node act as that user on the users documents.

[Jason Smith]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 2:01 AM, Jeff Charette <iom...@yahoo.com> wrote:

> What is your CouchDB host preference? Here has been my experience which
> leaves me as a loss for hosted services.
>
> Cloudant
> - doesn't support newest couch techniques like require and I can't find a
> tutorial to port my couch app.
>
> Iriscouch (currently using)
> - I have nothing but love for these guys, but have had a lot of issues
> lately. I've requested an upgrade with no response unfortunetly.
> - they are on 1.2.1 which would be great, but 1.2.1 has a big issue which
> has been fixed for 1.2.2
> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-1651

Thanks for your love. Regarding Iris Couch, I am biased; but I myself have
nothing but love for the people at Cloudant, too. Of course, ultimately,
you don't need people, you need the stuff they make and do (i.e. CouchDB
service).

You are right that we have had issues lately. We've always had random
failures; but this is the first time things have gotten bad enough that
general users felt prolonged slowness or unavailability.

Long story short: these issues are behind us and we are back to our
well-known quality of service.

I thought our failure would be a boring story, but maybe I'll tell it
anyway.

The big problem was that we failed to support people, not that we failed to
run software. Do you know how lots of stuff runs just fine from 0% to about
90% or 95% capacity, then it collapses horribly (e.g. memory, filesystems,
disk i/o)? We experienced a similar collapse with customer support.

The past two weeks, due to vacations and traveling engineers, we were doing
less regular maintenance than usual. Then, also randomly, a few machines
crashed badly. As a sysadmin I like CouchDB, because only safe operations
are allowed. (For example, CouchDB has no JOINs, therefore every read
operation is guaranteed to complete in logarithmic time.) That is usually
the situation; however there is still the occasional memory leak or out of
control process or whatever. Anyway, we exhausted memory on several
machines which crashed many people's couches.

That's fine; but the real collapse happened when everybody began to inquire
about their server. Fixing stuff over SSH is quick, but supporting people
takes much more time. When we saw the support volume spike, I decided to
enter triage mode: make a priority list of technical and personal
obligations and work from the top down.

All software has real-time constraints. In fact, all human activity has
real-time constraints. Right? Right? Hello? Hello! Can you hear me? After a
certain time, if something is not done, it may as well never be done. That
is how I approached our support load.

I have learned from many trusted advisors (Hi, Jan and Noah and everyone!)
that "support load" is a terrible phrase. CPU load is CPU load; but
"support load" is people. So, I have learned my lesson, and we are now
working through the entire backlog. Some people emailed to tell us
nevermind, they had moved to Cloudant. I think they wanted to twist the
knife a bit, to blow off steam. Okay, but that put them near the bottom of
our priority list (they are no longer using the service; outstanding issues
are moot). However they are still people. We will be emailing even them, to
say the issue has been resolved. If you ask a question, I should respond,
otherwise it's rude.

--
Iris Couch

[Jeff Charette]

I figured you guys were under fire. Glad to hear you are on the other side of that. I am still on and sticking with iris and probably will use cloudant too eventually. I hope my questions didn't cause any issues, just had to launch 6 months of work and I myself am under that support load as we speak. Looking forward to the premium service when you guys get to it.

Also, anything I can do to help, let me know. We are a lot better at design than development.

Jeff Charette | Principal
We Are Charette
web / identity / packaging

m 415.298.2707
w wearecharette.com
e jef...@wearecharette.com

[Mike West]

I have been a CouchDB developer (and consumer of hosting services) for
a long time. Over the past few years, many things have changed in the
CouchDB world, but something that has remained consistent is having a
free (for most of us), standards-based hosting platform to experiment
with and depend on. The value Iris Couch, and particularly Jason, has
provided is immeasurable. Database administration is hard, especially
with a platform that is so unique and flexible. I would recommend Iris
Couch to anybody.

I have also been using both Cloudant and Couchbase 2.0 the last couple
months and have been blown away with what these companies have
accomplished. I feel lucky to be part of a community with such talent
and technical diversity. CouchDB is definitely much more than
database... http://caolanmcmahon.com/posts/couchdb_is_not_a_database/

[Lance Carlson]

+1000

[Stephen Bartell]

Jeff, the auth is in the headers.

Using externals, your node app will get the request, which will contain the headers, which will contain the auth. Have the app pick the auth bits out of the headers and plug them into the headers of the new requests it is about to make.

[Jeff Charette]

I ended up using the admin account from couch to do what I need, but am going to circle back on this. I tried that approach by passing the AuthSession already to no avail. What else do I need in the header or is there a good doc on this?

Jeff Charette | Principal
We Are Charette
web / identity / packaging

m 415.298.2707
w wearecharette.com
e jef...@wearecharette.com

[Carlos Notebook]

Passing the headers is also controlled by a flag in the configuration.

Also, check that no other process / middleware from your platform is
overwriting them.

[Lance Carlson]

Any updates on Ubuntu + Couchdb's version? I noticed a new release of
Ubuntu is out (well new to me) and it's still stuck on 1.2.0. Anyway we can
bump this to 1.3.0 ?

[Noah Slater]

Probably not the right thread for this.

Note: The Ubuntu package comes from Debian. The Debian maintainer is Laszlo
Boszormenyi, and I do not believe he monitors this list. You're best
reaching out to him and prodding him for updates. (He might also welcome
assistance if you have time to spare!)

--
NS