Couchbase is designed to scale horizontally from the ground up and has a built-in architecture that supports sharding and replication, making it efficient in handling growth by adding resources. Unlike many other NoSQL databases, Couchbase's architecture takes a different approach to scalability, with automatic sharding and built-in replication across every node. Despite not being the most popular database, Couchbase is still in the top 10% of databases worldwide and has been adopted by many companies for its features, performance, scalability, and affordability. Industry standard benchmarks and customer testimonials demonstrate its capabilities, and it enables use of widely regarded industry standards and frameworks. The next post in this series will discuss Couchbase's unique approach to memory usage and clarify the confusion between CouchDB and Couchbase.