Orchestrate, the 4 in 1 DBaaS

Store your data and query it with the way you prefer

As mentioned in my previous post, I’m testing different NoBackend systems and I will try to give a complete review for all of them. Today it’s Orchestrate.

Orchestrate.io is a Databases as a Service. Yes, Database(s) because, in the same service, you have access as much as a key-value, full text search, events & graph databases.

At first, it can be off topic to talk about Orchestrate as a NoBackend but if you think, the feature here is the storage of data. It’s not a hosting of MongoDB, CouchDB or PostgreSQL, it has its own system but in the end, you don’t have to deal with replicas, managing different types of databases (4 in 1). That’s why I consider it as part of NoBackend ecosystem.

Before going deeper with Orchestrate, you have to understand the concept of having 4 databases in one.

The key/value is the main database. You can store a simple value or a JSON object, it’s schemaless. From it, you can query the full text search engine which use the same query language as Lucene! The events can be added to objects of the key/value database. It can be logs, status, analytics or whatever is related to events in time. Finally, you can query the graph by creating relationships between objects.

Having 4 databases in the same one has a lot of advantages. At first, you don’t have to deal the synchronisation between the different types of databases :

• key/value (MongoDB, CouchDB or Redis)
• full text search (Elasticsearch, Apache Solr)
• events (Keen.io maybe, I don’t know a lot of this type)
• graph (Neo4j, OrientDB)
• geospatial (it’s currently in development. It can be handled by MongoDB per example with 2dsphere indexes)

For accessing your data, there is a REST API to query all the databases. Until now there is no CORS support or ACL, so you can only use it from your back end. They have a web interface to play with your data. They already have drivers for NodeJS, Python, Java, Go. The Ruby one is in development but honestly, the REST API isn’t that complicated. You can use it with your favorite HTTP client.

Developers who created Riak founded this company. I never had a chance to play with this database, but I heard a lot about it. You can consider they’re badass.

They’re deployed on AWS us-east-1 like Heroku & MongoHQ. You can easily export all your data, so no lock-in. They replicate 3 times your data and backup them every day.

But for me, one of the biggest advantage is the price. The first plan starts at $39/month and the subscription rise for more support. You are billed for the number of calls to the API. Only $2/million API calls and the first plan has already 10 million of calls included. The free-tier is generous and far enough for proof of concept project.

Next article, I will show how I play with it to make an appointments system easily.