Let's say I have set up continuous bidirectional replication in CouchDB:
HostA <-> HostB.
As far as I understand, this is the simplest master-master replication - so both HostA and HostB accept reads and writes. Is it possible for the client to be transparet on which database he operates? I use Ektorp as a Java driver for CouchDB. When I initialize the connection I have to provide the IP address, for example http://HostA.mydomain.com:5984. What happens when this host is actually down? I would like to achieve transparency, like in RavenDB's client library - when HostA is down, it tries to connect to the other replicated hosts (http://ravendb.net/docs/article-page/3.0/csharp/client-api/bundles/how-client-integrates-with-replication-bundle).
In other words - is CouchDB aware of its replication targets so that the client doesn't have to manually choose the currently-alive host?
One way to achieve this is to use a load balancer like HAProxy. HAproxy is commonly used with web application servers, but can be used with any server that uses HTTP. You can find an example configuration in the couchdb repo.