Congratulations to our newest member of the Couchbase Champion team! Meet Michael Hirschberg.

Tell us about yourself and what you do in your daily role?

I am a senior system engineer, working for Amadeus for the last eight years.

My responsibilities include:

Automating cluster deployment/maintenance



Providing an API to the internal tools (to issue commands like a rebalance from the internal ops manager framework)



Taking care of the PCI audit



Cluster sizing



Maintaining the Couchbase environment (like patching)



Normal daily business (like resolving incidents and problems)

Where are you based and what do you like to do in your spare time?

I’m based in Erding, Bavaria. In my spare time I like to listen to music on vinyl and play music with others, when possible.

What made you choose Couchbase?

Amadeus started to look at Couchbase in 2012 because a replacement for the internal memcached farms was urgently needed.

What have you accomplished using Couchbase?

We are currently migrating our biggest memcached/MySQL farm to Couchbase. So far, three out of seven application peaks have been migrated (25% writes, 45% reads) with no issues – everything runs as expected.

Couchbase is also used in many other projects (like R-Box), but the above is the largest (once completely migrated, it’s going to be 550B requests/day, ~30% writes).

What one feature of Couchbase do you use and what should people know about it?

Graceful failover! It allows me to easily automate rolling upgrades on low-traffic clusters.

I also like the new PAM integration + RBAC feature, disabling HTTP access to the UI, which helps a lot during our PCI-DSS audit.

If you could have three wishes for Couchbase what would they be?

– Diskless buckets! In some cases we just don’t need any persistency, but have no way to disable it.

– More useful log in the UI (for example, the audit log is not there).

– Last but not least, man pages for the cmd tools! An excellent example is the cbc-pillowfight man.

What is your favorite book or author, and why?

Right now my favorite author is Andreas Eschbach. He tells interesting stories and raises important philosophical questions. His book, “Lord of All Things,” is a good example.