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Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

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Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#251

Post by adaptiveValleys »

senderista wrote: post #182
mrep wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely because it was faster. Amazon's strategy is to launch new features ASAP and then rely on everyone having to be on-call to fix shit when it inevitably breaks in prod because they rushed to launch. I will admit that while their "operational excellence" is shit, the security engineers do have quite a bit of power to block launches so their security isn't as bad as the reliability. However, the fact that write…

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.

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 ensure eventual market dominance. Sure, it could give you important feedback. But if your product is subpar, the feedback will have a ton of noise and possibly be useless. Plus it's not worth creating negative externalities and earning the reputation.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#252

Post by deanCommie »

int_19h wrote: post #212
elygre wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also always found it amusing that people thought API design was not creative and protectable. Like, “how many ways can you do a date api”, and then turn around to look at the original java Date api, the Calendar api, JodaTime and JSR310.

An API is just a collection of facts of the form, "if the system gets input X, the system produces output Y". And facts shouldn't be copyrightable.

You could describe inventions as "facts" too, are you saying that inventions shouldn't be patentable as well?

Maybe the fundamental properties of the universe aren't copyrightable/trademarkable/patentable, but what you CHOOSE to do with those - what API you design or what widget you build out of it certainly is.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#253

Post by scarface74 »

privateSFacct wrote: post #203
scarface74 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in tech do people think that a money losing company is “successful” because they were able to convince investors to buy stock instead of defining success as having a business model where income is greater than expenses. In reality long term profitability is the only metric that matters for a corporation

And in contrast to these startups with their "success" AWS is printing cash for amazon which releases surprisingly few "metrics" beyond $ in and $ out.

And at the end of the day. What else matters when measuring whether a profit seeking corporation is successful?

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#254

Post by nailer »

adaptiveValleys wrote: post #251
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.

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…

> If only they had a competitor that could launch the same products a few months later but offered higher reliability off the bat

Doesn't Azure Cosmos DB do this? From https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cosmos-db/introductio...

> You can elastically scale throughput and storage, and take advantage of fast, single-digit-millisecond data access using your favorite API among SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Tables, or Gremlin.

Haven't used it though, so would welcome some real world experience.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#255

Post by Lazare »

ProblemFactory wrote: post #238
Lazare wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, Cantrill put it well: > ...for those open source companies that still harbor magical beliefs, let me put this to you as directly as possible: cloud services providers are emphatically not going to license your proprietary software. I mean, you knew that, right? MongoDB Inc cannot make Amazon pay commercial license fees. That is not a thing that will happen. They have a lever in front of them with two posi…

> They have a lever in front of them with two positions, one of which is "large cloud companies might use your software for free", and the other is "large cloud companies will not use your software at all". Was that even the goal? My impression of the licensing change was not that they expected to Amazon to pay fees for offering a hosted MongoDB service. It was instead to lock Amazon out, and keep MongoDB Inc. as the…

> My impression of the licensing change was not that they expected to Amazon to pay fees for offering a hosted MongoDB service. It was instead to lock Amazon out, and keep MongoDB Inc. as the only "cloud provider" of a hosted MongoDB service.

Oh absolutely. I don't think they really thought they could force Amazon to license MongoDB, but I do think they believed they could force Amazon to not offer something that competed directly with Atlas.

That hasn't worked out for them very well.

(Not that I think leaving the license alone would have worked out any better. To the best of my knowledge, the MySQL, Postgres, Redis, and Memcache projects have not particularly benefited from Amazon building RDS and Elasticache on top of them, and I see no reason to think Amazon would have contributed a bunch of great patches upstream for MongoDB either.)

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#256

Post by mark_l_watson »

anonytrary wrote: post #11
mark_l_watson wrote: post #8

Looks good. I used to use both MongoDB and CouchDB (for very different use cases) a lot but haven’t touched them in a long while.

Out of curiosity, what use cases did you have for CouchDB that weren't feasible with MongoDB?

Easy remote replication. Also, I found BigCouch effective - multi-tenant but otherwise just like using CouchDB.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#257

Post by manigandham »

scarface74 wrote: post #133
erikig wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice if Amazon provided an API to access the data via SQL alongside the MongoDB API; I've seen quite a number of organizations migrate from mongo to Postgres once they get out of the rapid development phase. This would make that transition butter smooth.

Anecdote: I led a C# project where we could seamlessly switch back and forth between Mongo and SQL Server without changing the underlying LINQ expressions. We sent the expressions to the Mongo driver and they got translated to MongoQuery we sent the expressions to Entity Framework and they got translated to Sql Server.

C# is ahead of the game with LINQ, expression syntax, and the entire Rosyln platform. Passing an IQueryable around that can be interpreted and transformed for multiple backends is a incredibly productive. I wish more people knew about this, and .NET in general.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#258

Post by mabbo »

kllvql wrote: post #140
LamaOfRuin wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's rarely actually true for anyone that wants to operate for more than a short time period. There are significant costs to gouging your customers. Anything from it being illegal, to it encouraging competition and your customers being motivated to actively flee you and shit on your reputation. The correct pricing strategy for people that don't have a long term enforceable monopoly is "whatever most customers are w…

I think you've hit on what always bothers me about this sentiment. It is obvious that at any point in time you can charge the maximum customers are willing to pay, but that allows for disruption through the channels like competition. The opposite where you charge the minimum to continue providing the goods or services seems optimal, though, leads to a company with zero profits that is unattractive to investment. Is t…

> Amazon employee working in Physical Consumer (not AWS)

You too? I'm in AFT. I posted the original "whatever the customer is willing to pay" comment. Mostly just offhand and yeah there's a lot of nuance to it.

I don't mean that anyone should want to individually gouge each customer, but when running a business one should pick a price whereby the total long term profit is maximized.

Your pricing determines the number of customers. Your pricing also determines the profit on each customer. But choosing your pricing strategy correctly, you should have some people who won't buy your product.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#259

Post by christilut »

throwaway204 wrote: post #32
whalesalad wrote: post #14

Serious question: is there any real reason to use Mongo over Elasticsearch?

ES grew out of Lucene, which provided an inverted index of all the text in a document, with a bunch of NLP related features bolted onto that. While ostensibly designed to be developer friendly, ES had and still has a horribly hacked together API with bugs and mis-documented misfeatures all over the place. In my experience it's anything but developer friendly. But if all you need is a text index on a document store wi…

When was your experience with Mongo? I'm wondering because I use Mongo now with transactions (supported since version 4) and I like to know about problems I might face in the future.

Re: Amazon DocumentDB, with MongoDB compatibility

#260

Post by sokoloff »

adaptiveValleys wrote: post #251
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.

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…

For how many customers do all of AWS flaws combined represent more than 2% of their production outages? I think it’s a very small number.
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