News

AWS-Based MongoDB Service Gets Live Migrations, More

• By David Ramel
• 04/21/2017

A month after announcing a free tier for the MongoDB Atlas service hosted on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud, MongoDB Inc. has updated the offering with a new live migration capability and several other improvements.

MongoDB is a document-oriented NoSQL database that consistently ranks high on popularity reports for that database niche (like here) and all databases (like here).

The MongoDB Atlas Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is available on the AWS Marketplace, which states: "MongoDB Atlas provides all of the features of MongoDB, without all of the operational heavy lifting, all through a pay-as-you-go model billed on an hourly basis, enabling you to focus on what you do best."

When MongoDB Inc. announced a free tier for Atlas last month, it also introduced MongoMirror for migrating existing MongoDB databases into the AWS cloud.

Now, the company said, that migration functionality is baked into Atlas.

"Live migration allows us to automate the import of any pre-existing MongoDB 3.0+ replica set into MongoDB Atlas," the company's Sahir Azam said in a blog post Tuesday. "It works by performing an initial sync between a source database and a target database in Atlas, and then tailing the source oplog to keep the database in Atlas in sync with live updates from your application."

Other improvements to the service include:

• Availability in more AWS regions: "MongoDB Atlas is now available in most AWS regions, which means users around the world can leverage the database service with minimal geographical latency."
• Queryable backup snapshots: This provides "the ability to query backup snapshots and restore data at the document level in minutes. No longer do we need to restore an entire cluster when all we really need is a small subset of our data."
• The new ability to explore databases from the Atlas UI: "The new Data Explorer in MongoDB Atlas allows us run queries, view metadata about our databases and collections, and see index usage statistics without resorting to the mongo shell. We can access the Data Explorer for dedicated Atlas clusters by selecting the new 'DATA' button associated with our databases."

These improvements build on others that MongoDB Inc. announced last November, such as new AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering provided in a new MongoDB 3.4 release.

While MongoDB Atlas now only works with the AWS cloud, the company said it plans to support other cloud platforms -- such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform -- in the future.