AWS has recently announced the release of Amazon DocumentDB, a document database that offers rapid, highly available, and scalable service that is compatible with users of MongoDB applications and tools.
While MongoDB is a popular database for storing and managing semi-structured data, users still find it difficult to create highly available and efficient applications that rapidly scale with growing terabytes of data. MongoDB clusters are difficult to set up and manage at scale.
Amazon DocumentDB was created to provide the performance, speed, and scalability that users look for when running highly important MongoDB workloads. Amazon DocumentDB uses Apache2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API, emulating the responses of a MongoDB server for its clients. This means DocumentDB adapts to any MongoDB drivers and tools you currently use.
This service uses a purpose-built SSD-based storage layer, with 6x replication across 3 separate Availability Zones. The storage layer is distributed, fault-tolerant, and self-healing, giving you the performance needed to run production-scale MongoDB workloads. It can also auto-scale up to 64 TB per database cluster, provide 99.99% availability, and create copies of your data spread out over three AWS Availability Zones.
Why Use Amazon DocumentDB?
Compatible with MongoDB – No need to switch to new MongoDB drivers and tools. Amazon DocumentDB is compatible with existing MongoDB clients. To update the application, you simply switch the database endpoint to the Amazon DocumentDB cluster. Supported MongoDB APIs may be found here.
Highly Available – Amazon DocumentDB creates six replicas of your data over three AWS Availability Zones. The service will also constantly survey the health of your instances and will automatically fail over to a read replica should a failure occur. It will also back up your data to Amazon S3, providing a point of recovery of up to 35 days. Given all this, Amazon DocumentDB guarantees 99.999% availability.
Scales Easily – Amazon DocumentDB can auto-scale up to 64 Terabytes per database cluster. By entering only the changes to the storage layer, it lowers database input-output writing by preventing slow, inefficient, and expensive data replications over network links. Combining optimizations such as advanced query processing, connection pooling, and optimized recovery and rebuild, the service provides double the throughput of current MongoDB managed services. Since the DocumentDB storage and compute portions are decoupled, they may scale independently. Users may quickly scale read capacity to millions of requests per second by including 15 low latency copies over three Availability Zones.
Secure – Amazon DocumentDB has several layers of protection: Amazon VPC, encryption at rest with keys you yourself create using AWS KMS, and encryption-in-transit through TLS. Data in automated backups, snapshots, and replicas in the same cluster are also encrypted.
Fully-Managed – Amazon DocumentDB takes care of hardware provisioning, updates, setup, configuration management, and backing up. The service also monitors and backups data to Amazon S3. With Amazon CloudWatch, you can monitor over 20 essential operational metrics for your database instances.
How to Use DocumentDB
- Migrate MongoDB workloads to the Cloud
By moving your onsite MongoDB workloads to the AWS cloud, you are able to save on effort, time and money. You no longer need to manually configure, manage, and secure database clusters, run backups, or monitor your workloads.
- Build high-performance mobile and Web Apps
Develop apps that can scale accordingly to the number of users. DocumentDB lets you manage even millions of requests per second. This lets you focus operational efforts on creating value for customers instead of managing resources. With DocumentDB’s features, you can also shorten development time by letting you rapidly iterate your applications.
- Manage both Content and Catalog
Amazon DocumentDB’s flexible document model, data types, and indexing allow for easy and rapid searches for content and catalogs. A great service for shopping websites, digital archives, POS terminals, and self-service devices.
Marco is a managing partner at copebit. He got seven AWS certifications. He has spent three years in Australia and has worked with AWS and DevOps technologies for the last 6 years.