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MongoHQ releases SSD powered databases, autoscaling beta

blog.mongohq.com

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Re: MongoHQ releases SSD powered databases, autoscaling beta

#21

Post by mrkurt »

lnanek2 wrote: post #16
andypants wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the pricing I don't like, it's the relationship between pricing and storage space. I doubt when I go from a 0.5GB database to a 1GB database that they have to double their support team as well. Heroku's postgres is just as (or more) expensive as mongohq/mongolab, but they don't limit storage at all (except at the dev tier plans).

Agreed. I have to do things like store large things in Amazon S3 when I'd really rather just stick it in GridFS. The pricing is just way to high to do anything else.

GridFS is great for convenience, but blobs are not Mongo's strength. Large files should almost always be stored in something like S3, regardless of price.

Re: MongoHQ releases SSD powered databases, autoscaling beta

#22

Post by patrickod »

We've used MongoHQ extensively for the last 2 years and have always found them to be excellent. The team is both incredibly dedicated and knowledgable. They are the experts in anything MongoDB related. If you're thinking of using MongoDB you should use them. No questions asked

Re: MongoHQ releases SSD powered databases, autoscaling beta

#23

Post by jongleberry »

mrkurt wrote: post #18
andypants wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the pricing I don't like, it's the relationship between pricing and storage space. I doubt when I go from a 0.5GB database to a 1GB database that they have to double their support team as well. Heroku's postgres is just as (or more) expensive as mongohq/mongolab, but they don't limit storage at all (except at the dev tier plans).

Database storage space correlates pretty well to the management complexity, at least with our customer base. Offering unlimited storage on a DB is somewhat disingenuous, there are effective resource limits that matter long before disk space and those (RAM/IO capacity) are the things that cost actual money.

is there a possibility of foregoing EBS storage, using instance storage, and creating incremental backups to S3 using a secondary server on a replica set? is there a reason this would be a bad idea? seems like it would cost a lot less.

Re: MongoHQ releases SSD powered databases, autoscaling beta

#24

Post by bifrost »

nodesocket wrote: post #4

MongoHQ is awesome, and their control panel is hands down the best of the MongoDB PaaS, but their pricing is cost prohibitively expensive. For example, you can get a 2 core, 2GB memory, 20GB of SSD backed storage from DigitalOcean for $20 a month. So, buying three VM's from Digital Ocean for a replica set is a total of $60 a month. Essentially the same thing at MongoHQ is $500 a month. I completely understand that yo…

I am going to echo mrkurt's sentiments on this one. The cost is really more about management and the ability to buy opportunity to scale without real friction, less about cost of backing services. In general thats what has made AWS so successful, and why PaaS is gaining in popularity. Granted its not always troublefree but for a large portion of the industry it alleviates a HUGE pain point which IMHO is worth its weight in gold.

Ultimately, MongoHQ are pros and you're paying for their time and expertise, I am pretty sure if you were going to buy consulting time from them it would cost a lot more than what they charge for their service.

Re: MongoHQ releases SSD powered databases, autoscaling beta

#25

Post by bifrost »

mrkurt wrote: post #20
fiatmoney wrote: post #8

My impression has been that Mongo has great performance as long as your working set is totally in RAM, after which it craters (due to the use of MMAP'd files as the core storage engine and relying on the OS's paging algos). To what extent is this true on SSDs? Can you get away with a higher working-set-to-RAM ratio?

We've generally found that 1GB of RAM per 10GB of data is best for common Mongo setups. SSDs make a huge impact on the to-disk performance, which does help with the working set. SSDs also help with writes and can help mitigate the infamous global write lock problems in Mongo.

Any tests on ZFS?

Re: MongoHQ releases SSD powered databases, autoscaling beta

#26

Post by jacques_chester »

_neil wrote: post #7
saalweachter wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they're catering to people who either (a) don't know how cheaply you can run a database or (b) know how expensive it is to run a database well . The number of times I've seen a database go down in production either because it's solitary mirror failed with no one noticing or because it wasn't consider "mission critical" enough to have a mirror... you're not just paying for the hardware, you're paying for the guys…

This. We have a small team for a particular project I'm on and we were initially hosting mongo ourselves. After reading so many horror stories, we felt much more comfortable outsourcing configuration, management, and backups until we get to the point that we can have a dedicated DB person.

Given that you were motivated by "horror stories", did you also consider changing data stores?

Re: MongoHQ releases SSD powered databases, autoscaling beta

#27

Post by _neil »

jacques_chester wrote: post #26
_neil wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. We have a small team for a particular project I'm on and we were initially hosting mongo ourselves. After reading so many horror stories, we felt much more comfortable outsourcing configuration, management, and backups until we get to the point that we can have a dedicated DB person.

Given that you were motivated by "horror stories", did you also consider changing data stores?

That's fair. Yes, we did consider changing. But we haven't had any issues ourselves or a real need for a structured database at this time. If we do in the future, transitioning won't be extremely painful because most of our historical data isn't critical; it would mainly just be user accounts.

For us, saying, "oh shit, a handful of other people had a bad experience – we should drop everything and move our data to postgres" would have been a bad decision and a waste of time/money.

Re: MongoHQ releases SSD powered databases, autoscaling beta

#28

Post by jacques_chester »

_neil wrote: post #27
jacques_chester wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that you were motivated by "horror stories", did you also consider changing data stores?

That's fair. Yes, we did consider changing. But we haven't had any issues ourselves or a real need for a structured database at this time. If we do in the future, transitioning won't be extremely painful because most of our historical data isn't critical; it would mainly just be user accounts. For us, saying, "oh shit, a handful of other people had a bad experience – we should drop everything and move our data to pos…

Thanks for the reply. I'm a pro-RDBMS bigot, but path dependency is path dependency. In your position I would probably make the same decision.
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