This article was originally written by Anil Kumar

For those of you anxiously waiting for the next Couchbase Server release, we have great news! We’re excited to announce the public release of Couchbase Server 2.5 Enterprise Edition. This new release delivers some exciting new capabilities in the area of reliability and security that continue to make Couchbase Server the first and best NoSQL database choice for enterprises. Couchbase Server 2.5 includes new features for rack zone awareness and cross datacenter data encryption that further advance our ability to enable enterprises to scale globally and securely without sacrificing high availability and reliability.

Here are the key highlights of this release:

Rack-Zone Awareness - This feature will allow logical groupings of Couchbase Server nodes (where each group is physically located on a rack or an availability zone). Couchbase Server will automatically allocate replica copies of data on servers that belong to a group different from where the active data lives. This significantly increases reliability in case an entire rack becomes unavailable. This is of particularly importance for customers running deployments in public clouds.

You can read more about Rack-Zone Awareness concepts here and administrative tasks to perform here.

Secure Cross Datacenter Replication (XDCR) - If you’re replicating data between Couchbase clusters over the internet, you’ll be interested in this security feature to protect your data over-the-wire. Secure cross datacenter replication uses SSL to encrypt data. In secure XDCR, both uni and bidirectional replication streams are encrypted.

You can read more about XDCR data security concepts here and administrative tasks to perform here.

Optimized Connection Management  - This feature significantly improves connection scaling capabilities in Couchbase server. This means that more Couchbase clients can connect to Couchbase Server, enabling higher scale.

You can read more about optimized connection management here.

In addition to the above main highlights, there are several other bug fixes that improve the stability and user experience of the product.

I highly recommend all our existing and new users to download Couchbase Server 2.5 and give it a try! Please provide your feedback on our latest release.

To learn more, join us at our upcoming webinar that introduces Couchbase Server 2.5 with hands-on tour of the new features in Couchbase Server with a live demo.