Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced a MongoDB compatible Amazon DocumentDB designed to provide performance, scalability, and availability needed while operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads.
Customers use MongoDB as a document database to retrieve, store and manage semi-structured data. But it is difficult to build performant, highly available applications that can quickly scale to multiple terabytes and thousands of reads- and writes-per-second because of the complexity that comes with setting up MongoDB clusters at scale.
I was able to play with Amazon DocumentDB before it launched. As a long time user of MongoDB I was highly impressed by the scalability of DocumentDB and how it streamlined some of the traditional MongoDB pain points that I've experienced over the past 6 years of prod MongoDB use
— Nathan Peck (@nathankpeck) January 9, 2019
Amazon DocumentDB uses a fault-tolerant, distributed and self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64 TB per database cluster. With AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) users can migrate their MongoDB databases which are on-premise or on Amazon EC2 to Amazon DocumentDB for free (for six months) with no downtime.
Features of Amazon DocumentDB
Compatibility
Amazon DocumentDB, compatible with version 3.6 of MongoDB, also implements the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API. This implementation is possible by emulating the responses that a MongoDB client expects from a MongoDB server, further allowing users to use the existing MongoDB drivers and tools with Amazon DocumentDB.
Scalability
Storage in the Amazon DocumentDB can be scaled from 10 GB to 64 TB in increments of 10 GB. With this document database service, users don’t have to preallocate storage or monitor free space. Users can choose between six instance sizes (15.25 GiB (Gibibyte) to 488 GiB of memory) and also create up to 15 read replicas. Storage and compute can be decoupled and one can easily scale each one independently as needed.
Performance
Amazon DocumentDB stores database changes as a log stream which allows users to process millions of reads per second with millisecond latency. This storage model provides an increase in the performance without compromising data durability and further enhance the overall scalability.
Reliability
Amazon DocumentDB’s 6-way storage replication provides high availability. It can failover from primary to a replica within 30 seconds and also supports MongoDB replica set emulation such that the applications can quickly handle system failure.
Fully Managed
Amazon DocumentDB is fully managed with fault detection, built-in monitoring, and failover. Users can set up daily snapshot backups, take manual snapshots, or use either one to create a fresh cluster if necessary. It integrates with Amazon CloudWatch, so users can monitor over 20 key operational metrics for their database instances via the AWS Management Console.
Secure
Users can encrypt their active data, snapshots, and replicas with the KMS (Key Management Service) key while creating Amazon DocumentDB clusters. In this document database service, authentication is enabled by default. For the security of the database, it also uses network isolation with the help of Amazon VPC.
According to Infoworld, this news has given rise to few speculations as AWS isn’t promising that its managed service will work with all applications that use MongoDB. But this move by Amazon has now led to a new rivalry. MongoDB CEO and president Dev Ittycheria told Techcrunch, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it’s not surprising that Amazon would try to capitalize on the popularity and momentum of MongoDB’s document model. However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market.”
As reported by Geekwire and Techcrunch, Amazon DocumentDB’s compatibility with MongoDB is unlikely to require commercial licensing from MongoDB.
Update on this: MongoDB is saying that the API AWS is using to make DocumentDB possible "is part of the MongoDB server and is licensed under either AGPLv3 or MongoDB’s server side public license (“SSPL”)," not Apache 2.0 as AWS said in its blog post. https://t.co/Q5WETjEfdm
— Tom Krazit (@tomkrazit) January 10, 2019
To know more about Amazon DocumentDB, check out Amazon DocumentDB.
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