Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

Amazon is getting a lot of attention for breaking up with its business partners, and Amazon is now trying to replace MongoDB with its own "compatible" version of DocumentDB after deciding to abandon its Oracle database and use its own services.

Interestingly, AWS's announcement of abandoning Oracle came after Oracle CEO Larry Ellison boasted that AWS and Salesforce were running on their database. It is worth noting that MongoDB specifically modified its license terms to prevent "abandonment", but doing so seems to make things worse.

MongoDB license may hasten its demise

The MongoDB server-side public license essentially requires that any cloud provider providing a MongoDB service must open up all the code related to the service, which is not acceptable to all cloud providers, so it is not surprising that AWS publishes DocumentDB. DocumentDB is designed for version 3.6 released before the license takes effect, and SSPL does not seem to be applicable to DocumentDB. In addition, the new Amazon product is basically a set of compatible api on its own database, so it doesn't actually use any MongoDB code.

AWS is by far the largest public cloud, and the release of DocumentDB has led to a collapse in MongoDB's stock. DocumentDB only supports MongoDB 3.6.This may reflect a serious problem: if AWS's new services become popular, MongoDB has no choice but to open up its latest services, or risk stagnation. That's why MongoDB changing its license terms is like suicide. Not only does the new license fail to protect MongoDB from "bad wolves" like AWS, it will even expose it to more criticism from the open source community. For example, in response to SSPL,Debian and RedHat both decided not to include MongoDB's latest product because it was considered to be against the spirit of open source.

AWS: do what you do best

In its latest announcement, AWS describes DocumentDB as "a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads." This means that MongoDB itself cannot handle large workloads, and it also means that AWS is selling its core competencies to customers, namely convenience through performance, scalability, and availability. AWS also said in a statement that because of the complexity of setting up and managing MongoDB clusters, companies rarely take advantage of a small portion of MongoDB api's features, and they find it challenging to scale to multiple tb and hundreds of thousands of reads and writes per second.

AWS sells not software but convenience, while MongoDB provides customers with the tools to get the job done. AWS gives them what they really want, and someone else does the job for them. Achieving performance, scalability, and availability upgrades without managing the underlying infrastructure is what every enterprise pursues, which is why AWS is so successful. For convenience, users can use MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools to handle workloads on Amazon DocumentDB, and with the help of the AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), they can perform live migrations from MongoDB without downtime.

AWS DocumentDB

Amazon DocumentDB uses a SSD-based storage tier for 6x replication in three separate availability zones, which not only means that DocumentDB can move data from the primary server to the replica server in 30 seconds, but also supports MongoDB replica set emulation. As part of its "fully managed" product, it also has automatic configuration and setup, monitoring metrics and automatic software patching. In addition, DocumentDB storage can scale from 10 GB to 64 TB in increments of 10 GB and reduce database I / O by writing only database changes to the storage tier. It also claims that its throughput is twice that of currently available MongoDB solutions.

This may be because the storage and computing of DocumentDB are separated from each other and are allowed to scale independently. At the same time, this means that developers can ignore the size of the data and add up to 15 low-latency copies in minutes, increasing the read capacity to millions of requests per second.

In addition to speed, scalability, and availability, DocumentDB focuses on security and runs in Amazon VPC, which allows enterprises to isolate clusters in their own virtual networks. It also integrates with AWS identity and access Management (IAM), allowing enterprises to encrypt databases with keys created and controlled through AWS Key Management Service (KMS).

MongoDB

MongoDB's CEO Dev Ittycheria said: "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it's not surprising that Amazon is trying to take advantage of the popularity and momentum of the MongoDB document model." He claimed that DocumentDB was just a parody. Another spokesman for the company pointed out that DocumentDB is based on a two-year-old version that lacks new features such as ACID features, clustering and mobile synchronization. Although MongoDB's stock plummeted after DocumentDB's announcement, which undoubtedly shows the strength of AWS itself, MongoDB's stock has risen 200% in the past year, so it's too early to classify MongoDB as a loser.

In response, MongoDB offers its own open source database hosting version through MongoDB Atlas's product, which is based on the latest version of MongoDB 4.0. In a recent article, CTO Eliot Horowitz compared the two services and pointed out that DocumentDB is actually about six years behind and closer to version 2.4 than version 3.6. It also points out a series of shortcomings caused by AWS's promised performance, scalability, and availability, including the fact that all DocumentDB clusters are limited to a single area. This is different from Atlas, which allows replica sets to expand and provides low latency.

AWS and Open Source

All in all, it's a dilemma between left and right, and people don't know whether to sympathize with MongoDB or support AWS's decision to openly steal the open source community. From AWS's point of view, they are not selling MongoDB, they are just providing a service that enterprises value. If not MongoDB, it will be any other database that the customer is using or needs help. For example, in the Redis database, under a license agreement, the version of AWS is always up to date. While this is good for development, it doesn't help Redis Labs make a profit, which is probably why it changed its license.

It's hard for hard-working people to feel unhappy when it looks like AWS is still tirelessly shedding its wool, and it's hard not to sympathize with companies like Redis and MongoDB.

However, everything has two sides, and they may be popular because they are initially open source, and there is always a market for "hosting" open source services. Does this mean that AWS will continue to get what it wants from the open source community at will, or will the law protect companies like MongoDB? Only the future can know the answer.

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