Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#281

Post by InspiredIdiot » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 3:56 PM UTC

bnjmn wrote: post #274

Looking through the supported APIs ( https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide... ), it appears DocumentDB has no support for Mongo's oplog ( https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/replica-set-oplog/ ), or change streams ( https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/changeStreams ), which I guess is no surprise because change streams were introduced in Mongo 4, whereas DocumentDB copied the 3.6 API. So DocumentD…

Also the aggregation pipeline is seriously hobbled with way more No-s than Yes-es over here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide...

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#282

Post by halbritt » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

Corrado wrote: post #244

senderista wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there for the launch of a major AWS service where they had an entire separate team working on the next iteration since well before launch (because the initial design wasn’t even intended to be sustainable). They are happy to incur technical risk (and in this case, to eat major losses in hardware costs) in order to be first to market.

We used MongoDB in my last job and I just want to say that I would have given up management of that beast in a heartbeat. We didn't stress MongoDB nearly enough to warrant all the effort required to construct it, monitor it, back it up, etc. Even if the performance was crappy, I would have lobbied hard to change to DocumentDB ASAP.

While I don't love MongoDB, I don't find it to be especially difficult to run. I'm running ~200 instances of MongoDB with a small team and it consumes very little of my attention.

ElasticSearch on the other hand...

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#283

Post by halbritt » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 4:42 PM UTC

talawahdotnet wrote: post #272

adaptiveValleys wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they are, so they a pass those lovely negative externalities onto the customer because they know it's in demand and only they provide that service. If only they had a competitor that could launch the same products a few months later but offered higher reliability off the bat, that could eventually force Amazon to improve their reliability or risk losing customers long term. Being first to market doesn't ensu…

You think AWS has a reliability problem for their database products? That's news to me. AWS often launches products with limited features, but security, durability and reliability tend to be the standard. Reliability is the trickiest of the three because it requires the customer to architect their solution with multi-AZ support in mind, but AWS always provides the foundation for that architecture. Could they, and sho…

From my perspective, performance and scaling issues are most likely to occur.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#284

Post by driverdan » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 4:52 PM UTC

buremba wrote: post #230

I don't understand why people are reacting to it so aggressively. That's basically how AWS works, they did the same to Apach Kafka with Kinesis, Prestodb with Athena, PostgreSQL and MySQL with Aurora, Redis with ElastiCache and many others over the last 4 years so it's not new. It took too long for the open-source community to figure out that the cloud providers are killing them, now it's too late. Well played, AWS.

> It took too long for the open-source community to figure out that the cloud providers are killing them

How are service providers killing FOSS? That doesn't make sense. Permissive FOSS licensing allows anyone to use their software, regardless of how it's used, and that's how it should be.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#285

Post by halbritt » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 4:58 PM UTC

aortenzi wrote: post #275

api wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago I realized that a hidden driver for the growth of cloud is this. The cloud is DRM, and almost uncrackable DRM at that since you have neither the code nor the hardware.

Software and the control plane is the razor, compute resources are the blades. Amazon's software is its loss leader.

Not really. There's roughly a 50% premium vs raw EC2 instances for any RDS related service. The crux is keeping the operating cost below that delta.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#286

Post by amyjess » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:03 PM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #131

dman wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the way out? Would love to hear from people.

Stop assuming the value in the development ecosystem belongs to you (and should be extractable as money). It doesn't. Realistically, the next step you will see, unless something changes, is that they will start going after people for API duplication. They have precedent (currently) on their side in the US. None of the reasonable players will touch this, but you can be sure some VC backed "open source" player will be…

> Realistically, the next step you will see, unless something changes, is that they will start going after people for API duplication. They have precedent (currently) on their side in the US.

IANAL, but since they already released the API as open-source under the Apache 2.0 license, this avenue is closed off to them.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#287

Post by amyjess » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:05 PM UTC

0xFFFF0000 wrote: post #165

Weird question: Could Microsoft sue Amazon here for infringing on the DocumentDB name? I mean Microsoft's DocumentDB was among the first to even have such a MongoDB layer also) and that was like 3 years ago. Given that current Amazon leaders actually came from Microsoft's data platform group this leaves a bit of a bad taste behind. I'm not working for either company.

For all any of us know, Amazon's lawyers already talked to Microsoft's lawyers about it and got permission beforehand.

See: Apple licensing the iOS name from Cisco before announcing the name change.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#288

Post by keepper » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:25 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #284

buremba wrote: post #230

I don't understand why people are reacting to it so aggressively. That's basically how AWS works, they did the same to Apach Kafka with Kinesis, Prestodb with Athena, PostgreSQL and MySQL with Aurora, Redis with ElastiCache and many others over the last 4 years so it's not new. It took too long for the open-source community to figure out that the cloud providers are killing them, now it's too late. Well played, AWS.

> It took too long for the open-source community to figure out that the cloud providers are killing them How are service providers killing FOSS? That doesn't make sense. Permissive FOSS licensing allows anyone to use their software, regardless of how it's used, and that's how it should be.

Do you get to see AWS's source code for these services?

No...

That's how it's killing "FOSS". Extend and Extinguish. This is not a new playbook.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#289

Post by keepper » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 5:31 PM UTC

The current biggest threat to Free and Open Source software is cloud computing. Plain and simple.[0]

I know this is a blunt and harsh statement to make, but when you sell a service, you have zero native incentives to Open Source the way your system works. It just opens up Competition. This is not unique to AWS/Amazon. But their success gives them the power to have wide OSS damage.

This is, to me, the biggest reason why cloud portability should be something that every customer of a cloud service should have in their plans. Amazon as a company has shown no timidness in both "embracing, extending, extinguishing" their competition.

OSS literally built the internet and opened up the wold wild communication age, let's not be so short sighted that we don't see proliferation of cloud services ( specifically one having so much dominance), for what it really is.

[0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts...

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#290

Post by ctvo » Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #237

tanilama wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS prioritizes launch above EVERYTHING. It is their strategy, to have market tells them what to build. I think it works, and AWS has yet been brought down by this horizontal complexity. Quite an achievement, but might not be a satisfying experience for the engineers work there.

This is one of the main reasons why I don't like AWS services, everything just seems so half-finished. There's not a lot in AWS that I would trust enough to use in production. I wonder how widespread this view is. I suspect it's more widespread than Amazon realise. They may have optimised into a local maximum where they get a lot of value from being first to market, but could potentially get more by being first to "v…

What's your definition of production ready? AWS services when launched "half-finished" still do not have outages, data lost or security issues. They also come with metrics and enough monitoring to support them in production. Those are the major checkboxes for production ready.

AWS also has not had a reputation for deprecating services it launches. I find very little risk in taking a dependency on something AWS releases.