Availability

Local, or intra-cluster replication involves replicating data across the nodes of a cluster. When a bucket is defined, it can be specified to have up to 3 replicas (the number actually implemented by Couchbase Server may be less, if there are too few nodes in the cluster). This allows data to be maintained and updated in replica copies, which can be made active in the event of node-failure rendering active data inaccessible. Intra-cluster replication is supported by the Data Change Protocol.

Remote, or Cross Data Center Replication (XDCR) involves replicating data across different clusters, each of which may occupy a different data center. XDCR is configured after the creation of a suitable bucket on the local cluster, which will be the replication source, and another bucket on the remote cluster, which will be the replication target. Changes made to data within the source bucket are automatically replicated to the target bucket. Both source and target buckets can be accessed directly by applications: if both are indeed so accessed, XDCR replication is typically configured between them in both directions, so that each bucket is both a source and a target, and updated made on either cluster are replicated to the other.