AWS launches a fully managed document database service, DocumentDB

AWS yesterday announced the release of DocumentDB, a new database product that is compatible with the MongoDB API. AWS describes DocumentDB as “is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads.” In fact, it’s a simple alternative to the hosted version of MongoDB, without any MongoDB code.

AWS says that although MongoDB does a good job of functionality, the complexity of setting up and managing MongoDB clusters on a large scale makes it difficult for users to build terabytes and hundreds of thousands of reads and writes per second for the high-performance applications. Amazon DocumentDB is designed from the ground up to provide users with the performance, scalability, and availability needed to run mission-critical MongoDB workloads on a large scale and is compatible with the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API.

Patrick Cullen, Director of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence – The Washington Post, said, “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. From automated backup to multi-AZ failover, Amazon DocumentDB provides all the key 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.”