Having followed the sign up process and deployed your first cluster, follow the steps below to explore Couchbase Capella — loading data, configuring your cluster, and connecting to it along the way.
Click on the [Projects] tab on the left. This will show all the projects for your account. Projects are a great way to link clusters and users together for easier management. You can open a project by clicking on its name. With a project open, you will see a list of all clusters in the project, along with cluster health, cloud provider, and region information for each.
Now click on [Trial-Cluster].
You will now see multiple tabs below the cluster name. It will default to [Metrics]. As this is your first time examining the cluster, no metrics are shown. So let’s add some.
You can add metrics one-by-one by clicking in the Add Metrics area. The easier path is to use the template that is set up with several predefined metrics. Click the blue btn:[Data Services] link in the middle of the screen.
This will add several metrics to your dashboard.
To start looking at some data, we first need to import a sample. Let’s do that now.
1. Click on the [Tools] tab and choose Import.
Here you will see three sample data sets and their descriptions. We will use the Travel Sample. If you want to get a detailed description of the data, data model, and other information about the data set, click on the [Learn More] link.
2. Press the [Import] button within the Travel Sample area. This will start loading the data. It takes about a minute to load all the data.
Click on the [Configuration] tab.
The configuration tab shows settings like services, nodes, compute, and disk type. Following the free trial, and in a real account, you will be able to add & remove nodes and very easily make changes to hardware, memory, and storage.
This makes it easy to scale horizontally and vertically. Following configuration changes, Capella will automatically rebalance your data across nodes. No changes are needed on the application side. Also, services can be assigned per node, a feature we call Multi-Dimensional Scaling. For example, you may want compute-optimized hardware for one service and memory-optimized hardware for another. This helps you performance match your application’s needs to the database and its infrastructure. By more efficiently using your hardware, you improve performance while also bringing down TCO.
Click on the [Buckets] tab.
A bucket is a database within Couchbase. You can have more than one bucket. If you load all three datasets, then you will see them all here. You can see lots of information about each bucket.
We are going to make a change to the memory allocated to this bucket.
1. Click on the name of the bucket. This will open a flyout with more details.
2. Click on the Memory tab and change the default of 200 to 1000. Then click [Update]. This will make our queries faster later on.
Click on the [Connect] tab. This is where we will find information to establish an external connection to your Capella cluster.
Listed in the Wide Area Network area, you will see your database endpoint. The endpoint in the screenshot below has been changed, so your endpoint will look a little different.
Click on the [Manage Allowed IP] link to enter your IP address. You must add your own IP address to connect to your cluster
1. Click [Add Allowed IP]
2. For this exercise, choose the Add Permanent IP block.
3. Beside the IP Address/CIDR Block field, click [Add My IP]
4. The IP address your computer is currently using will be filled into the IP Address/CIDR Block field.
5. Optionally add a descriptive comment, then click the btn:[Add IP] button. Your IP address is saved as an Allowed IP for connecting to your cluster.
Click on the [SDK examples] link. This will open a flyout that provides details and sample connection code on the many SDKs for Capella.
In order to connect an external application to Capella, you must define at least one set of credentials. Click on the [Manage Credentials] link. Then click the btn:[Create Database Credentials] on the right.
This will allow you to set up new credentials.
1. Enter a username and password.
1. Now choose your buckets, scopes, and access type. Choose All Buckets, All Scopes, and Read/Write. Press [Create].
Congratulations. You finished this part of the tutorial. Click "Next Step" to move to the next section.