Hi, I’m testing out both Couchbase and the Autonomous Operator for the first time. We really want to run Couchbase on kubernetes, but we don’t have the budget for an enterprise license yet, so just wondering if the Autonomous Operator supports the community edition? I’m guessing no, but I couldn’t find a solid answer.
Which leads me to the other question, I’ve read that users are allowed to use the enterprise edition for pre-production workloads. What, exactly, does that mean? Is it a number of nodes? Is it the type of work? Duration of work? Or, something else?
The whole nature of our couchbase use is experimental but I’d rather not run afoul of licensing issues.
Thank you for reaching out. Couchbase Autonomous Operator is Enterprise only it does not support Community edition.
As mentioned in Couchbase Licensing and Support FAQ Customers can use Enterprise Edition free-of-charge for unlimited pre-production development and testing with forum support. For customers who want full technical support during development, QA, and/or pre-production testing, an Enterprise Edition subscription is required.
Hope that answers your question. Please let us know if you have any other question.
Think of “development”, “testing”, “staging”, and “production” environments. During development, a programmer runs Couchbase on her laptop. In a testing environment, a team of Quality Engineers tries to break everything. Staging is where you simulate a live environment and do final testing right before your project goes live. At the end of it all, the production environment is the final product, whether it’s a service you expose to your customers, or a live internal site used by your co-workers.
In this context, “development”, “testing”, and “staging” are all “pre-production”. Basically what we’re saying is that you don’t need an Enterprise Edition (EE) license for the Couchbase EE nodes used to develop and test your project, but you do need a license for any Couchbase EE nodes that run in your production environment (whether it’s used by internal or external customers).