

Bye, MongoDB. Hello, Cloudant - chinmoy
http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/37338222496/bye-mongodb-hello-cloudant

======
benmccann
I really wish they had been more specific about the problems they faced. It
sounds like part of the headache was that they had to write their own MongoDB
to ElasticSearch connector. However, 10gen has now written one which they
could use to avoid writing and maintaining their own:
[http://blog.mongodb.org/post/29127828146/introducing-
mongo-c...](http://blog.mongodb.org/post/29127828146/introducing-mongo-
connector)

~~~
cnagele
Hi Ben, the ES connector was part of it. At a certain point we had our custom
oplog follower working well. After so many years working with MongoDB, we just
lost trust in it, to be honest. We ran into so many bugs, replication issues
(two secondaries and no primary) and the only way to get what we needed out of
it was to use all SSD storage (Even flashcache did not work).

I have to admit that this was for our use case, and I know that MongoDB works
extremely well for some people. We still use it in Beanstalk for our
deployment logs and have no complaints. It's a much smaller dataset though.

Really nice to see that 10gen made an ES connector. ES is still young, but
it's amazing. One thing that I always respected about 10gen is how they
maintain all of the drivers and code.

------
josh2600
We run BigCouch from Cloudant and it's amazing. They are awesome folks and
spoke at our conference last year.

<https://github.com/cloudant/bigcouch>

Disclaimer: I'm the community manager for <http://www.2600hz.com>

~~~
rdtsc
I love CouchDB. There was talk on the mailing list and IRC channel about
eventually merging in BigCouch with CouchDB code base. That would be awesome.

~~~
mlmilleratmit
That's well underway and planned for the 2.0 release of CouchDB.

~~~
clark-kent
Can't wait!

~~~
fidanov
WoW! Really good news.

------
gingerlime
Interesting to find out what was going on behind the scenes at postmark. As a
(albeit small) customer, we were noticing something was going on, but not
exactly sure what. It's great to see the postmark guys sharing the info and
being transparent. Overall I really like the service despite the recent
issues.

As far as cloudant, I also never heard of it. Trying to go through the
website, is this effectively a managed CouchDB in the cloud? Also, just
wondering what's the migration path _out_ of it (or who provides alternative
service) _just in case_ something doesn't work out.

~~~
cnagele
Chris from Postmark here. We definitely had some trouble over the last few
weeks. I am hoping we are beyond that in terms of architecture. So far
everything looks great.

Regarding lock-in, this was pretty important to us when we decided to migrate.
We prefer to control everything in our data center, so if it came down to it,
we wanted that option. Since the Cloudant API is compatible with CouchDB, the
migration path is not that hard. Although, considering our impression so far
and their expertise, I don't expect it will come to that point.

~~~
gingerlime
Thanks for the info Chris. I certainly hope you won't have to make another big
move, but vendor lock-in is always a consideration. Also, I'm curious about
network/other latency and bandwidth limits when it comes to accessing cloud-
based database services. Did you do any measurements on that before or after
switching?

...and regards to Natalie, Dana and the rest of the postmark team!

EDIT: noticed info about latency from cloudant on another comment.

------
chrissharkey
We were running our own Bigcouch cluster and having all sorts of issues
scaling to large numbers of databases (50k+), but after moving to Cloudant it
handled it just fine.

It does cost more, but we don't worry about our database now and can focus on
what we're actually good at.

Their search feature seems to be pretty good too. It is based on Lucene and is
very flexible!

Chris Sharkey, Bislr

------
d0m
Cloudant seems interesting, never heard of them before. The pricing is
intriguing. (<https://cloudant.com/pricing/>) From what I understand, it's
free for most small projects but could get very pricey very fast, but then,
handling millions of customers is far from being trivial to handle so I'm sure
it's worth the price. Thoughts about the Cloudant pricing versus in-house
solution (or vps)?

~~~
ahoff
Our pricing as stated on the page can be somewhat confusing. We're working on
making it both less expensive and more transparent to the end user.

------
neya
Is this going to become a trend here? Some random start-up writing "Bye-bye
<insert database name>" or "Why we moved from <db1 name> to <db2 name>"??

~~~
georgemcbay
_Going_ to become a trend? Posts like this have been fairly common for years
now.

~~~
neya
No, I meant the frequency of such posts have increased in the past few
months..

~~~
taligent
NoSQL databases are becoming very common place now and there are a lot more
companies and hosted providers than there used to be. So naturally you are
going to see more stories of people switching away from traditional SQL
databases.

I work for a large enterprise who previously was an Oracle shop and even they
are starting to using MongoDB and CouchDB internally.

~~~
neya
Yeah, maybe you're right..

>I work for a large enterprise who previously was an Oracle shop and even they
are starting to using MongoDB and CouchDB internally.

Whoa..that's a pretty serious claim..seriously? If yes, then I think it really
is the start of a new revolution...

~~~
lwat
They're not shutting down their Oracle DBs though. Or at least I hope not.

~~~
taligent
No. But all new development isn't being done on it.

My point is that stories like this are becoming the new norm especially with
companies like 10gen and Datastax wining and dining CIO/GMs pretty hard.
MongoDB in particular is getting a (misguided IMHO) reputation as a drop-in
replacement for MySQL. And the last MongoDB training session had developers
from banks, insurance companies, finance houses etc.

I am pretty sure that many of the next 10+ years of in-house built enterprise
apps will be using NoSQL databases. Which will in turn then result in
university courses changing thus affecting the next generation of programmers.

~~~
MichaelGG
"MongoDB in particular is getting a (misguided IMHO) reputation as a drop-in
replacement for MySQL."

I am so confused by this. Can you elaborate? Besides the word "database", what
do those systems have in common? How is it a drop-in replacement?

The only reputation common to both is regarding data integrity, and it's not a
good one.

------
nsainaney
We looked at MongoDB for our back end at <http://moj.io> and preferred
CouchDB. It's currently a toss up between Iriscouch and Cloudant. Both seem
like great offerings. We are particularly interested in the ability to sync to
CouchDB on iOS/Android/Windows Phone in the future.

Does anyone prefer one service over the other?

------
thesis
Can anyone share how latency is overcome using a cloud based database?

~~~
jameswyse
It's not a problem if they're both in the same data center, not sure who
cloudant are using though.

~~~
mlmilleratmit
(Mike Miller, Cloudant). Exactly, we run cloudant clusters in nearly 20 data
centers globally on many different providers (ec2, softlayer, rackspace,
joyent, azure, hostway, ...) so we make sure that the data and application
tiers are co-located.

Dealing with direct connections from mobile is more fun.

~~~
dmix
You should address this more clearly on your sales website. It's the first
question people will have regarding using a database-as-a-service.

So mentioning the data centers you are in would be helpful.

~~~
mlmilleratmit
You're right, we should address that more clearly. Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
taligent
Seriously do. I spent a few minutes looking for the list of data centres. And
when I couldn't find it I left with the assumption that it was going to be a
slow, pricey mess.

Nothing is more important than transparency when you are providing core
infrastructure.

------
pbbakkum
On Mongo: "we were not big fans of the master/slave architecture"

I don't quite understand this, that architecture was basically deprecated a
while back, can you elaborate?

~~~
cnagele
Sorry, I need to correct that. I meant that shards are basically still primary
/ secondary with an arbiter for failover. We prefer horizontal nodes instead,
like Cloudant, Elastic Search or Cassandra offers.

~~~
pbbakkum
Ahh, I see. Why do you guys prefer that configuration? Space/resources,
reliability?

~~~
mlmilleratmit
Space/resources was certainly a concern in this case. A disk-based solution
with predictable latencies enables storage of far more data than something
that requires holding the working set in RAM.

------
zapfmann
Grr.. I can't figure if you can deploy cloudant in an on ec2 avail zone that
you have your app in. Can you you even deploy it on ec2?

I don't see anything stating answers to these questions clearly on their site.
And they want my email to let me see tech docs! Are they run by former IBM
staff?

Finally, if they are 'hosted and managed all day everyday' some place far from
me. I dunno if I want to use it.

~~~
zapfmann
Ah. Spoke too soon. The comments here lead me to believe cloudant is to be
used as a couchdb replica provider.

Maybe cloudant should say that on their pages! :-)

