Question

I have been reading about mongodb since 2 weeks back. I have given a read like mongodb is designed with the intention that it should be agile, scalable and cloud-ready.

I can understand the first two here(agile & scalable).

Shall anyone of you shed some light on mongodb and it cloud readiness….?

What is the feature of mongodb making it cloud-ready…?

Answer 1

First, a caveat, “The Cloud” is something of an abstract concept, and a marketing buzz word, which can be taken many different ways. Therefore lets narrow that definition down to something that makes sense in the context of a database and virtualized environments like Rackspace and Amazon EC2.

Those environments enable you, the user, to spin up instances of operating systems quickly and easily based on your requirements with flexible options in terms of memory, storage and computing resources. There are even options to do this automatically with built in tools (platform dependent) or ones you write/manage yourself (chef, puppet, etc).

Within that context, MongoDB is “cloud ready” because it does several things:

First, it is horizontally scalable for reads (reads from slaves, replica sets) and writes (sharding), which means that being able to spin up new instances quickly (a defining feature of the cloud versus ordering new hardware) and add them to your cluster helps you scale out your database.

Second, it is multi-platform. Whether you are running a Linux variant, Windows, or other operating systems in the cloud, you can still just grab a binary download (or, for Linux, use a package) and deploy.

Next, there are plenty of how-tos and documents around to describe deploying MongoDB in the cloud. This might seem obvious, but having known implementations, recommendations and white papers relating to actual deployments can be invaluable when deploying in a new Cloud based infrastructure.

“Cloud ready” is not a technical specification, it’s not something you can be certified against, but I think the descriptions above capture the basic idea of what it means for a product to be appropriate and ready for the cloud.