[chef] Getting off of couchdb?

[Ian Marlier < >]

Hey, Chefs --

As we've rolled out Chef to larger and larger sites, I've discovered that CouchDB is a significant scaling problem.  The time to compact the database and views has risen (and risen, and risen), and search performance has declined.  I've heard rumblings that Hosted Chef is no longer using Couch as it's backend, which suggests that Opscode might have hit this pain as well.

There's obviously some tuning that we could do to Couch which would make it behave better, but I need to scale it to approx. 40x what it's currently doing in order to roll out Chef to the remaining sites in my environment, and I'm extremely skeptical that anything -- even the most aggressive tuning -- will make that work.

I'm wondering a few things:
  - Are there existing branches of Chef (within Opscode or otherwise) that aim to replace CouchDB with another database (be it a document-based store or something more relational)?
  - Are any of those branches public, or are there plans to roll those changes into the open source version?
  - If those branches don't exist, how much interest is there on the list in removing the dependency on CouchDB?  Would other people be interested in participating in a project like that?

- Ian

--

Ian Marlier | Senior Systems Engineer

Brightcove, Inc.

One Cambridge Center, 12th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142
" target="_blank">