AWS squares up to Microsoft in chase for MongoDB cloud budgets

Amazon Web Services has joined the chase for MongoDB developers' cloud budgets, announcing new support for NoSQL databases being added to its prize-pony Database Migration Service.

In announcing its new support for MongoDB databases as a migration source—and its own DynamoDB as a migration target—the cloudy crew are joining an increasingly competitive race for developers' money when it comes to hosting NoSQL databases.

MongoDB itself released a free tier for its own DBaaS offering Atlas back in March, which the company told us it considered a strategic part of the business.

While Atlas is already is available on AWS, Google's Cloud Platform, and on Azure, Mongo's director of product and market analysis, Mat Keep, told The Register that unlike the major vendors' own NoSQL offerings, Atlas offered platform independence. Those using services like AWS's DynamoDB, Microsoft Azure's DocumentDB, and GCP's Spanner faced vendor lock-in, Keep claimed.

Of course, such claims about lock-in have been touted before by AWS's rivals, including the database mogul himself, Larry Ellison, who declared that database products and apps built on AWS stay on AWS: "Build an app on Redshift and you will be running it forever on Amazon – you are locked in, baby," he said. "So if Amazon raises its prices, you'd better get out your chequebook."

Those not built on AWS, but moved there through its Database Migration Service (DMS) presumably fall within the remit of Larry's complaint too. AWS chief Andy Jassy has not been shy about celebrating how successful the service has been on those grounds, with DMS support for MongoDB coming in addition to the relational database and data warehouse migration it already offers.

On last New Year's Eve Jassy bragged that the service had captured more than 16,000 databases from its rivals since launch on 15 March, 2016. According to him, later that month, the DMS has completed more than 20,000 migrations, and by the end of March, Jassy was claiming 22,000 migrations of either Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, or PostgreSQL databases "with virtually no downtime" had been completed, although questions have been raised as to whether Jassy has just been jazzing on the DMS numbers.

If more NoSQL-based applications head to AWS, we're sure Jazzy will let us know. ®