So I'm happy MongoDB is acquiring additional expertise in hosting...
... but I wish this announcement was a bit different. It says (numbers mine):
1. You will be given plenty of time to migrate, and nothing will be required of you for at least 4 months. We expect to have all customers migrated to Atlas within the next 12 months.
2. Once migrated, your Atlas database will be hosted on similar hardware and cost the same or less than your original plan on mLab.
3. We will provide tools that allow you to migrate with either minimal downtime or no downtime to your application.
I'm fine with the second point. I wish the first and third points instead read:
1. We will publish detailed migration documents by the end of 2018. No action will be required of any customer until a minimum of 9 months after that documentation has been published. We can guarantee all customers following current mLab best practices will be able to migrate with zero downtime should they so choose. As with many migrations, it may be much easier to migrate with a very small amount of downtime, rather than none. To those customers we will offer account credits for their trouble.
I think Mongo is well suited to pure PaaS. Worrying about whether the hardware or software is similar is about the same as worrying about the details of hardware or software. If the needs are very specific, hosting it on a pure PaaS shouldn't be used, but more of an IaaS type of solution.
I think most mLab users rely heavily on mLab's expertise, so if they trust them now it makes sense to trust them after being acquired by a company that's demonstrated interest the type of product they're providing.
Can't say I'm exactly over the moon about this. Although Atlas does seem to be quite a bit cheaper and probably offers a better implementation of the product, mLab's key offering was always the incredibly good support they provide as standard. I haven't needed it often, but I know I can rely on it.
Atlas does not include this - it's something you pay (a lot) extra for and I'm pretty apprehensive about whether it's actually going to be great support or not. At this point my primary worry is that it's going to be more AWS-style support, i.e. expensive and total crap.
The fact that there's no mention of support in the email or blog post does not fill me with hope.
Any Atlas customers who can chime in with their anecdata?
Can't agree more on the positive comments about mlab. We migrated to them from compose ~2years ago (after horrible support experiences) and have been happy since. At the time, we looked at atlas and their support offerings for affordable plans was just bad. Also, mlab offered a lot of help in the migration while atlas only sent us some sales guys.
Here's a blog post that outlines the best MongoDB hosting alternatives - ScaleGrid, Compose, and ObjectRocket. All three have free support, and ScaleGrid allows you to keep full MongoDB admin access and SSH access to your machines. https://scalegrid.io/blog/mongodb-acquires-mlab-what-are-the...
AWS is total crap? We received great support and advice for just $30month extra with AWS. It wasn't emergency support granted but helped us with various cloudwatch setup detailsm
I hope this does not mean death to the free 500MB mLab tier. I have been using it for small personal projects with Heroku and have been extremely happy.
MongoDB has been deprecated and on the way out at $work for a while now, and we have gradually been rewriting and migrating services to more suitable/sane database tech.
I can confidently say that this migration would have gone a lot faster if it wasn’t for MLab.
They are expensive, but the quality and level of support has been amazing, and this has allowed us to balance building features and addressing other tech debt work, safe in the knowledge that when an overloaded mongo cluster implodes at 3am because the query planner did something stupid, MLab will be there within minutes, and will know exactly how to bail us out.
I've recently done a bunch of research on the best hosting options for MongoDB because we use it at our startup [1] and DB hosting is one of our biggest service expenses.
The major options I found worth considering were Atlas (owned by MongoDB), mLab, and Compose (owned by IBM). Pricing, performance, and versioning all seemed significantly better with Atlas. This narrows the options even more.
I wonder if they intend on jacking up prices once they own the majority of the market, and are one of the only reasonable solutions... I sure hope not.
If DB is one of your biggest expenses... why no run your own DB? Paying for someone to spin up instances is quite optional in the big picture. The operational complexity of running a DB is not hard. That said, Mongo is a poor choice for any app ever written. I would question why you would use a best-in-class at nothing Database with many operational issues.
Shouldn't be illegal to buy a competitor that do exactly the same things as you when the sum of the market share is greater that 50% ? I know it depends on the definition of the relevant market that could be "hosted mongodb" ( mlab+atlas are maybe 70% of the market ) or "hosted documents DB" (maybe 40%) or "hosted DB" (maybe 5%). What do you think ?
The issue is whether it's bad for the customer, right?
There's the possibility that things could worsen, as there's the loss of competition. There's also the possibility things could improve, as there could be a concentration of effort on one product-suite rather than several.
I'm inclined to be optimistic in this case, as there's still competition from non-managed Mongo. If they go nuts with their price-point, people have the option to just dump them and manage their databases themselves.
They don't have proper lock-in, as the data can be exported with relatively little fuss. They earn their keep by delivering value to the customer month after month.
ObjectRocket is still owned by Rackspace - but they don't seem to be very integrated. ObjectRocket are still doing their own thing, fairly independently of the main Rackspace service.
While sometimes a longer timeframe to migrate is better (often, most times), there are edge cases where you want to migrate immediately after an announcement like this. For us, we'd like to get this done by next week. The sooner the better to avoid any schedule disruption thereafter.
I don't think the two are really comparable - completely different querying paradigms. Athena works by writing SQL queries against JSON, CSV, or other kinds of documents stored in S3. You pay per request and per GB scanned as part of your query.
MDB is a fully fledged database that can do aggregations, queries, etc.
I consider those two products addressing totally different problem sets but if you've found places where they're the same I'd be interested in learning more.
People love to hate on Mongo. Honestly these days it's really completely undeserved.
As long as you've bothered to actually read the docs on the things you're using before you use them, it will do just fine. Just because the drivers' default configurations are different from other DBs does not make it fundamentally bad.
IMO it's a fantastic DB and I constantly wish Postgres would get anything like the complex-object querying support that Mongo has.
[+] [-] preinheimer|7 years ago|reply
... but I wish this announcement was a bit different. It says (numbers mine):
1. You will be given plenty of time to migrate, and nothing will be required of you for at least 4 months. We expect to have all customers migrated to Atlas within the next 12 months.
2. Once migrated, your Atlas database will be hosted on similar hardware and cost the same or less than your original plan on mLab.
3. We will provide tools that allow you to migrate with either minimal downtime or no downtime to your application.
I'm fine with the second point. I wish the first and third points instead read:
1. We will publish detailed migration documents by the end of 2018. No action will be required of any customer until a minimum of 9 months after that documentation has been published. We can guarantee all customers following current mLab best practices will be able to migrate with zero downtime should they so choose. As with many migrations, it may be much easier to migrate with a very small amount of downtime, rather than none. To those customers we will offer account credits for their trouble.
[+] [-] benatkin|7 years ago|reply
I think most mLab users rely heavily on mLab's expertise, so if they trust them now it makes sense to trust them after being acquired by a company that's demonstrated interest the type of product they're providing.
[+] [-] BillinghamJ|7 years ago|reply
Atlas does not include this - it's something you pay (a lot) extra for and I'm pretty apprehensive about whether it's actually going to be great support or not. At this point my primary worry is that it's going to be more AWS-style support, i.e. expensive and total crap.
The fact that there's no mention of support in the email or blog post does not fill me with hope.
Any Atlas customers who can chime in with their anecdata?
[+] [-] devilsenigma|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rethab|7 years ago|reply
Let's see where this takes us.
[+] [-] KristiMKE|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sitepodmatt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manigandham|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgloutnikov|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alittletooraph|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amingilani|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thsowers|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BillinghamJ|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] CleanShirt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robterrell|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkr|7 years ago|reply
I can confidently say that this migration would have gone a lot faster if it wasn’t for MLab.
They are expensive, but the quality and level of support has been amazing, and this has allowed us to balance building features and addressing other tech debt work, safe in the knowledge that when an overloaded mongo cluster implodes at 3am because the query planner did something stupid, MLab will be there within minutes, and will know exactly how to bail us out.
[+] [-] a13n|7 years ago|reply
The major options I found worth considering were Atlas (owned by MongoDB), mLab, and Compose (owned by IBM). Pricing, performance, and versioning all seemed significantly better with Atlas. This narrows the options even more.
I wonder if they intend on jacking up prices once they own the majority of the market, and are one of the only reasonable solutions... I sure hope not.
[1] https://canny.io
[+] [-] efigle2501|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianwawok|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julienfr112|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MaxBarraclough|7 years ago|reply
There's the possibility that things could worsen, as there's the loss of competition. There's also the possibility things could improve, as there could be a concentration of effort on one product-suite rather than several.
I'm inclined to be optimistic in this case, as there's still competition from non-managed Mongo. If they go nuts with their price-point, people have the option to just dump them and manage their databases themselves.
They don't have proper lock-in, as the data can be exported with relatively little fuss. They earn their keep by delivering value to the customer month after month.
[+] [-] upbeatlinux|7 years ago|reply
Anyone have an idea at what market share looks like for for MongoDB hosting these days?
As an aside I recall Rackspace buying ObjectRocket when it when on it's SaaS / PaaS buying spree in 2013. Did RAX ever spin it off?
[+] [-] vincebowdren|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thsowers|7 years ago|reply
MongoDB really consolidating the Mongo hosting market
Wonder if Compose.io will be next? Their initial marketing push seemed to be largely toward Mongo, I see they support other DBs now
[+] [-] mprev|7 years ago|reply
I do wonder about latency. Unless you’re in the same zone in the same cloud, surely your queries are gonna be slow-ish.
[+] [-] jmacd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnklos|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdinsn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tima101|7 years ago|reply
I hope they will publish migration tools and docs soon. So there is enough time to migrate.
[+] [-] tomkinson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yannski|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squid3|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] browsercoin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ranman|7 years ago|reply
I don't think the two are really comparable - completely different querying paradigms. Athena works by writing SQL queries against JSON, CSV, or other kinds of documents stored in S3. You pay per request and per GB scanned as part of your query.
MDB is a fully fledged database that can do aggregations, queries, etc.
I consider those two products addressing totally different problem sets but if you've found places where they're the same I'd be interested in learning more.
[+] [-] dordoka|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redwood|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmchale|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BillinghamJ|7 years ago|reply
As long as you've bothered to actually read the docs on the things you're using before you use them, it will do just fine. Just because the drivers' default configurations are different from other DBs does not make it fundamentally bad.
IMO it's a fantastic DB and I constantly wish Postgres would get anything like the complex-object querying support that Mongo has.
[+] [-] freshhawk|7 years ago|reply