Canonical Drops CouchDB From Ubuntu One

rsk writes "Since the Ubuntu One desktop synchronization service was launched by Canonical it has always been powered by CouchDB, a popular document-oriented NoSQL data store with a powerful master-master replication architecture that runs in many different environments (servers, mobile devices, etc.). John Lenton, senior engineering manager at Canonical, announced that Canonical would be moving away from CouchDB due to a few unresolvable issues Canonical ran into in production with CouchDB and the scale/requirements of the Ubuntu One service. Instead, says Lenton, Canonical will be moving to a custom data storage abstraction layer (U1DB) that is platform agnostic as well as datastore agnostic; utilizing the native datastore on the host device (e.g. SQLite, MySQL, API layers, 'everything'). U1DB will be complete at some point after the 12.04 release."

Specific Issues

[mysqlrocks]

It would be interesting to hear more from Canonical about what specific issues they ran into. They say that they worked with "the company behind CouchDB." While Couchbase is one company "behind" the project, CouchDB itself is an Apache project. Did they reach out to the Apache project itself? Also, why build something completely new rather than provide patches to existing software? I'm sure they had good reasons, but I'd like to hear some more details about what did and didn't work for them.

Re:Specific Issues

[tildeslash]

A lot of newer tech companies prefer to develop their own systems these days; there is a new culture of "dogfooding" i.e. building your tools from scratch and using your own product. There are good technical reasons for doing so when you are innovating, as existing systems will never quite meet your requirements. This is especially true of the cloud and "big data" (non-relational DBs), which are both still young and rapidly evolving.

As for specifically what went wrong: I suspect that comes under trade secrets. Building a cloud is hard.