AWS Announces Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility)

By STS News Desk On Jan 10, 2019

AWS Announces Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility)

Fully managed MongoDB compatible database service designed from the ground up to be fast, scalable, and highly available

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Developers can use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools as they do today to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB and enjoy improved performance, scalability, and availability without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure. Customers can easily migrate their on-premises or Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) MongoDB databases to Amazon DocumentDB with virtually no downtime using the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS). There are no up-front investments required to use Amazon DocumentDB, and customers only pay for the capacity they use. To get started with Amazon DocumentDB.

AWS customers use MongoDB as a document database to store, retrieve, and manage semi-structured data. Customers like using the MongoDB Application Programming Interface (API) and expressive language query to help them quickly build and evolve applications, but they often only take advantage of a fraction of the functionality the API offers. Customers also find it challenging to build performant, highly available applications on MongoDB that can quickly scale to multiple Terabytes (TBs) and hundreds of thousands of reads and writes-per-second because of the complexity that comes with setting up and managing MongoDB clusters. As a result, customers spend a lot of time and expense managing MongoDB clusters at scale, including dealing with the undifferentiated heavy lifting of securing, patching, and operating MongoDB. Just like on-premises deployments, managed MongoDB systems face data replication challenges and they suffer from long recovery times in the event of failure. As a result, customers are struggling to get the performance, scalability, and availability their growing applications need over time.

Amazon DocumentDB is designed from the ground up to give customers the performance, scalability, and availability they need when operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads at scale. Amazon DocumentDB implements the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API by emulating the responses that a MongoDB client expects from a MongoDB server, allowing customers to use their existing MongoDB drivers and tools with Amazon DocumentDB. Amazon DocumentDB uses a unique, distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that automatically scales up to 64 TB of data per cluster, so customers can save time and money by not having to worry about capacity planning or over provisioning storage infrastructure. Amazon DocumentDB reduces database I/O by writing only database changes to the storage layer, avoiding slow, inefficient, and expensive data replication across network links. Together with optimizations like advanced query processing, connection pooling, and optimized recovery and rebuild, Amazon DocumentDB achieves twice the throughput of currently available MongoDB solutions. Additionally, with Amazon DocumentDB’s architecture, the storage and compute are decoupled, allowing each to scale independently, and developers can increase the read capacity to millions of requests per second by adding up to 15 low latency read replicas in minutes, regardless of data size. Amazon DocumentDB is designed for 99.99% availability by using the AWS multi-Availability Zone (AZ) technology and replicating six copies of a customer’s data across three AWS Availability Zones (AZs). Amazon DocumentDB’s architecture also allows customers to save money when running MongoDB databases as customers can get started with one instance for durability and only requires a second instance for high availability.

“While other companies have taken the same emulation approach we have to providing a MongoDB compatible service, nobody has built the unique, distributed, fault-tolerant, highly scalable, self-healing storage system that AWS has to work seamlessly with MongoDB,” said Shawn Bice, Vice President, Non-Relational Databases at AWS. “To meet developers’ needs, we looked at multiple different approaches to supporting MongoDB workloads and concluded that the best way to improve the customer experience was to build a new purpose-built document database from the ground up, while supporting the same MongoDB APIs that our customers currently use and like. This effort took more than two years of development, and we’re excited to make this available to our customers today.”

Amazon DocumentDB automatically and continuously backs up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and provides up to 35 days of point-in-time recovery with no downtime or performance degradation. Amazon DocumentDB supports network isolation using Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), encryption-at-rest using keys customers create and control through AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and encryption-in-transit using Transport Layer Security (TLS). To get started, customers can provision their Amazon DocumentDB clusters with a few simple clicks in the AWS Management Console or with the AWS Command Line Interface and launch their MongoDB-compatible database in minutes. Amazon DocumentDB is available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland), and will expand to additional AWS Regions in the coming year.

Capital One, a leading information-based technology company and digital banking leader, has taken a cloud-first approach to software development. “Our developers love the document model as it enables them to move fast and iterate quickly when building applications,” said Sunjay Pandey, Vice President, Capital One. “Amazon DocumentDB integrates deeply with AWS services and provides us with a robust, highly scalable, and cost effective database service that meets our operational requirements. With Amazon DocumentDB, our developers will be able to move faster and focus more on innovating on behalf of our customers versus managing a database.”

Dow Jones publishes some of the world’s most trusted, breaking, and exclusive business news and financial information in a variety of media, including the Dow Jones Industrial Average and related statistics and the Dow Jones Newswire. “Dow Jones uses a number of specialized databases including MongoDB to provide a variety of services for our customers,” said Ramin Beheshti, Chief Product & Technology Officer. “We are excited about collaborating with AWS around Amazon DocumentDB, which meets key needs we expressed to AWS in order to simplify our operations and free up our developers to invest in innovative experiences for our customers rather than undifferentiated operations.”

The Washington Post is one of the leading national and global news organizations reaching more than 90 million readers a month. “To provide our readers with the best possible experience, The Washington Post engineering team leverages AWS database services because they offer self-service provisioning without compromising operational excellence,” said Patrick Cullen, Director of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at The Washington Post. “From automated backup to multi-AZ failover, Amazon DocumentDB provides all the key APIs and features we need to build the world class systems that power both our Arc Publishing business and our machine learning platform. Document databases support the unstructured data that is prevalent in media, and with Amazon DocumentDB, we can now leverage AWS for all our critical database needs.”

Hudl provides coaches, athletes, and analysts the tools to study and improve performance through video and stats. “At Hudl, we utilize a significant amount of AWS services, as we’re always looking for opportunities to get out of the business of managing our own infrastructure,” said Brian Kaiser, CTO at Hudl. “Our developers love the MongoDB API and document model. We’re very excited about the launch of Amazon DocumentDB, as it fits perfectly into our short-term and long-term architectural plans. Amazon DocumentDB has the capabilities we’re looking for, and it’s great to see Amazon DMS support from day one.”