The MongoDB Team At The MongoDB World Event

MongoDB Inc. is stepping up efforts to monetize its wildly popular open-source database with a major upgrade to its complementary management service designed to taking some of the hassle out of configuring and provisioning the system. The launch comes as Oracle Corp., the kingpin of the enterprise database market, is also ramping up its cloud strategy.

The main highlight in the newest edition of MongoDB Management Service (MMS) is a set of capabilities aimed at making it more practical to scale the platform on and across different types of environments, a traditional pain point that has earned the company its fair share of criticism. To elevate the problem, MMS includes an agent-based automation system that promises to drastically reduce the amount of manual work that goes into handling the plumbing work for the database.

All the user has to do is specify the topography of their environment and let the service take it from there, according to MongoDB. The agents handle everything from the initial setup to server failures, adjusting their individual management plans using a built-in rules engine. MMS offers an even greater degree of automation for deployments running on Amazon.com Inc.’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform: the solution automatically provisions virtual machines, removing yet another time-consuming task from the admin’s plate.

To make things even simpler, MMS consolidates the management of on- and off-premise MongoDB installations under a sleek interface that not only centralizes operations but also provides the ability to increase the capacity of a database without taking it offline. Rounding out the offer is a unified monitoring console and an optional data protection function that offers continuous backups trailing only seconds behind the production environment. All of that adds up to make enterprise-scale deployments considerably less prohibitive than before the update to MMS.

But that still doesn’t address the main hurdle to operating MongoDB at large scale: the limitations of the underlying architecture. In placing the emphasis on making it as simple and accessible as possible, the designers have struggled to help users scale beyond 100 gigabytes. As a result, the platform is perceived as unwieldy for very large applications, a fact that MongoDB itself acknowledged on its a blog.

While this latest upgrade doesn’t address all the checklist items the firm proposes for users seeking to scale their deployments beyond 100 gigabytes, the sweeping upgrades to MMS mark a decisive step in the right direction. At 10,000 downloads per day, MongoDB is seeing robust user interest, but it’s in intense competition with other NoSQL startups that are also vying for a slice of the enterprise. These latest moves improve its position.

MongoDB Management Service is available at no charge for deployments with up to eight servers, and for $50 per machine per box after that. The optional backup and recovery feature is priced at $2.50 per gigabyte per month.