Hacker News Reader

Comment by infomofo | Hacker News Reader

I agree- I was a huge fan of MongoDB when it came out because of the unique data structures it enabled easily. However when it came time to select a new database for my new project, I found that the JSON support that PSQL had added gave me all the flexibility I needed while still in a somewhat relational form, and additionally it is dead simple to spin up postgres RDS instance in AWS, and it's a pain to use Mongo there.

View on HN

> ...instance in AWS, and it's a pain to use Mongo there

Why is that?

Quick google search doesn't hint at problems, but rather at pretty slick marketing pages: (which doesn't mean much, I know) https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/mongodb-on-the-aws-cloud-ne...

It's more then Postgres is so easy to use there with RDS which does all the setup for you.

Running MongoDB effectively on AWS is very expensive. It's the opposite of what AWS is optimized for. It requires a dedicated amount of RAM that scales with your database, and it requires permanent storage that's about 100x the size of the actual data.

It's very much unlike a nice, bursty, CPU-bound web server.

Also, you can't use the big selling point of AWS, which is that you can scale it "elastically". Okay, you could, but it would be a terrible experience with lots of unavailability.

How can MongoDB be a pain in AWS ? It is the easiest database in the world to setup. Download and run ./mongod. I've setup plenty of them in AWS and had zero issues.

And if we are talking about managed databases then it's equally dead simple to spin up a Compose/MongoLab instance in AWS.

Last I checked, the recommended production config of mongo, in the simplest case, required at least 3 separate servers configured in a master, slave, and arbitrator cluster. Compared with setting up AWS multi zone replicated RDS SQL servers (push a button), it is very much a pain.

Yes compose.io helps.

Edit: https://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/deploy-config-serve...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com