Couchbase, Inc., the cloud database platform company, is announcing a partnership with Soracom, a provider of cellular network solutions that enable IoT device connectivity using ubiquitous 5G, 4G LTE, and LPWAN cellular networks. This collaboration targets the ability for organizations operating in remote locations to capture IoT data from devices at the edge, specifically combining the power of Couchbase’s cloud database platform with subscriber identity module (SIM)-based edge devices.
Soracom offers SIM cards that cover several speed classes used in IoT devices globally, bringing connectivity to cellular networks for international IoT deployment—all with a single SIM card or Embedded SIM (eSIM). For edge locations, this connectivity is vital to ensure operations are continuous. Not only that, but the data from these edge devices must also be synced into a centralized location to resolve any sort of conflict that may occur.
Couchbase Capella, Couchbase’s cloud database platform for modern applications, including mobile and IoT application services, serves as the data layer supporting Soracom’s SIM networks at the edge.
Powered by a flexible JSON document model, Capella’s agility makes IoT data storage and retrieval of semi-structured or unstructured data easy, according to Couchbase. Capella is also able to support time series data without increasing complexity, further offering horizontal scalability and high availability which can adapt to the growing number of devices and data that IoT deployments often necessitate.
“As the world becomes more and more connected, it's going to be even more important to ensure the reliable delivery of the data from those IoT devices back into a centralized location where we can run analytics…get some insights, and push them back into the devices,” explained Rahul Pradhan, VP of product and strategy at Couchbase.
Couchbase Capella supports both mobile and edge computing environments, including offline data access via Couchbase’s offline-first model. Additionally, Couchbase Lite delivers an embedded JSON document database edge devices as part of a complete cloud-to-edge data sync solution, ensuring that functionality remains online in the event of temporary disruptions.
Versatility is another key component of Couchbase Capella’s ability to support IoT applications, supporting key-value, document, and query language (SQL++) models. Couchbase also features support for event and trigger capabilities, allowing developers to tailor their business logic to events or changes in the database.
Soracom and Couchbase both work toward securing IoT devices and their data, combining Soracom’s encryption workload offloading and end-to-end data security with Couchbase’s collection of capabilities for securing network connection, access control, and secure data storage.
“[At Couchbase,] we take security very seriously,” said Pradhan. “Working with Soracom, [we’ve developed a solution that] is essentially ensuring that the stream of data that comes from the IoT devices into our cloud is secure end-to-end and is authenticated…Only the data that is coming from the devices is actually authenticated to the endpoint, so we know who the data is coming from and it's secure.”
The exciting piece of Couchbase and Soracom’s partnership is allowing customers to have “the ability to go to the last mile…now you don't even have to worry about having your internet connectivity at the endpoint location—all you need is basically an IoT device,” explained Pradhan.
Furthermore, “the ability to ensure your data is still secure and is going to get synchronized when you connect back into your data center or through the cellular network is crucially important,” Pradhan concluded.
To learn more about Couchbase and Soracom’s partnership, please visit https://www.couchbase.com/ or https://www.soracom.io/.