MongoDB as a service | Hacker News Reader

MongoDB as a service

mongohq.com

26 pointsnreece12 comments

Wait a minute... If you need mongodb your app would probably be on a big scale right? In that case wouldn't you eventually self host your DB servers?

It's not that hard to setup a mongodb for testing and dev. So what's the use case for this type of service?

Why is MongoDB only for big scale sites? That's just bollocks. For some systems the Mongo-way just fits better. Scale or no scale.

So what's the use case for this type of service?

I don't have a direct answer. But like to see people actually doing things and looking at what happens.

I guess I can see it being useful for testing if it is free, but if this is meant for easy setup for small sites, they don't need mongodb. And if it's for use by a large site, they probably wouldn't outsource it's database systems for long.

Anyways as long as it's free, it's an interesting service and honestly I'm going to try it (been pretty lazy about upgrading my mongodb install).

wouldn't the latency of a roundtrip across the internet kill the usefulness of such db-in-the-cloud services?

I imagine its hosted on EC2, in which case, if you are too, it wouldn't matter. I imagine that if they get popular, nodes in Rackspace and a few other popular providers wouldn't be hard to do.

It is indeed hosted on EC2, and they provide you with an internal DNS name, so you can access it via EC2's internal network, which means it's pretty damn fast.

Just setup the damn thing on your machine; takes about 7 minutes.

Sure. But what about replication and fail-over? It's pretty easy with MongoDB, but not 7 minutes, and it do involve some system administration.

This is a perfect match for e.g. Heroku. With Heroku + (MongoHQ|Couch.io) you don't need to do any system administration yourself, which is a huge plus for many.