FaradayEffect

What are your thoughts on AWS's DocumentDB?

Back when I used to admin a MongoDB cluster it took literally 12-24 hours to sync a replica. I tried an rsync disk level copy first so it wouldn't have to sync as much data, but it still took hours before the replica would be ready. I even tried MongoDB Atlas: once again it was hours before the replica was ready. This was significant issue for me.

I don't use Mongo anymore, but I experimented with DocumentDB a while back and I really liked how their compute and storage are decoupled so that you can add more replicas almost instantly rather than taking hours of sync time.

Has this been improved in Atlas yet? What is the story for folks self hosting Mongo?

Hmmm, my understanding from reading the docs is the storage behind DocumentDB has 6 copies distributed across availability zones, its just decoupled from the frontend compute. That doesn't feel particularly risky to me.

I guess the trend that I'm seeing in several modern DB's is towards decoupling the compute and the storage layers more, so I'm curious in MongoDB has plans for something similar in the future.

Nice, that is helpful info. I still believe at the end of the day the most important thing is the MongoDB query interface and API, and the developer productivity boost from it that I saw at the last startup I was at.

I was a MongoDB user during the switch to WiredTiger and saw that big performance leap forward. Looking forward to seeing if DocumentDB ends up inspiring another leap forward in terms of storage layer in MongoDB