Infrastructure as code: Couchbase distributed cluster best practices – Part 1 introduction and theory

Arkadiusz Borucki, a Site Reliability Engineer at Amadeus, uses various technologies including NoSQL databases like Couchbase and MongoDB, automation tools such as Ansible, and Python in his day-to-day work. He is interested in big data, distributed systems, analytics, and automation. As a self-proclaimed big data enthusiast, he speaks at conferences and user groups in the US and Europe. The motivation behind using Infrastructure as Code is to overcome problems caused by manual configuration, such as inconsistent environments, slow deployments, and errors, especially when dealing with large-scale server farms and growing data sizes. By centralizing infrastructure setup and treating it like software code, tools like Ansible can be used for automation, orchestration, and consistency. The use of Git version control helps track changes and roll back to earlier configurations, while Couchbase's REST API enables direct management and operations from Ansible playbooks or Python scripts. Overall, using Infrastructure as Code with automation and orchestration techniques is essential for managing large-scale data storage systems like Couchbase in a modern world where data growth rates are high and consistency is crucial.