Anyone can make a mirror. That's the glory of CouchDB. Just kick off replication and BOOM you've got the npm registry. There are community mirrors in Europe (http://npmjs.eu) and Australia.
If you want to run or use a community mirror that's totally great!
I've started to always check in my node_modules directory. Heroku automatically runs `npm rebuild` in that case, so native modules always work. I've found it to be both faster and more reliable.
npm is pretty much the prime use-case for CouchDB.
REST API out of the box, replication is a core feature and not just a scaling feature (multi-master, MVCC) and the validation/access control is pretty much made for it.
The npm registry is implemented as a CouchApp for a reason.
I agree that from a functionality perspective this is largely true, at least on paper. That said, if running costs become a significant bottleneck CouchDB becomes a less obvious choice. Sometimes there's a reluctance to migrate from one technology to another as requirements change over time but this seems one of those occasions where exactly that step is required. Sometimes it's good to take a step back, look at your current requirements in terms of cost and performance and determine what technology best suits your needs. I would question the know-how and objectivity of anyone that would land on CouchDB/node.js in this instance.
Charlie Robbins (CEO and Co-Founder of Nodejitsu) here. I think your thoughts are really poignant. I’d like to make clear that public availability is the absolute top-priority for us over here but we chose to make a couple of choices that other Public Cloud PaaS companies did not. These choices enable us to offer the truly best-of-breed hosting opportunity for Node.js developers:
1. Early on we recognized that we would not exist as a company if the node.js community was not successful. That is why we have built and maintain over 200 open-source modules on npm.
2. Infrastructure agnostic (that’s right, you get to choose where your servers live).
3. Multiple platforms (currently Ubuntu and SmartOS).
4. 100% node.js up and down the stack. This is all we do and I think we do it better than anyone else. We also have provisioning, monitoring, and configuration management tools similar to our jitsu CLI for enterprises.
5. Commitment to immediate support: If you have a problem, you have a problem now, not tomorrow, not 3-days from now. As such, we want to make sure we grew our support team to support increased on-boarding and support requests resulting from public availability.
6. Private cloud support: this is currently where most of our customers reside. We license them software that they run in their datacenter or self-managed IaaS account.
So rest assured we ramping up for a public release. Feel free to email me at charlie [at] nodejitsu [d0t] com if you’d like to talk more.
We (nodejitsu) sponsored NodeSummit, but have no control over nodesummit.com. I have reached out to Charles Beeler (the conference organizer) to make him aware of the issue.
