Amazon Web Services Inc. is taking a shot at MongoDB Inc. with the launch today of its new Amazon DocumentDB database service.

Amazon said DocumentDB is a fast, scalable, highly available and fully managed document database service that runs on its cloud and is compatible with existing MongoDB applications and tools.

It’s essentially a repackaged version of MongoDB, which is an open-source database management system developed by the company of the same name. MongoDB uses a document-oriented database model which supports various forms of data.

It’s one of several nonrelational database technologies that arose in the mid-2000s under the NoSQL banner for use in big-data applications and other processing jobs involving data that doesn’t fit well in a rigid relational model. Instead of using tables and rows as in relational databases, the MongoDB architecture is made up of collections and documents.

Amazon makes no bones about MongoDB’s usefulness since it is the fifth most popular database in the world. The company said many of its customers run MongoDB on its infrastructure in order to store, retrieve and manage semistructured data that’s used to build and evolve mission-critical software applications.

However, Amazon reckons customers face a number of problems when running MongoDB on its cloud. It noted that customers can take advantage of only a fraction of the functionality offered by the MongoDB application programming interface. Further, it said, customers find it difficult to build applications on MongoDB with the high availability and scalability they need because of the complexity of setting up and managing clusters.

“As a result, customers spend a lot of time and expense managing MongoDB clusters at scale, including dealing with the undifferentiated heavy lifting of securing, patching, and operating MongoDB,” Amazon said. “Just like on-premises deployments, managed MongoDB systems face data replication challenges and they suffer from long recovery times in the event of failure. As a result, customers are struggling to get the performance, scalability and availability their growing applications need over time.”

AWS said DocumentDB has been built from the ground up to address these problems. The database uses the open-source MongoDB 3.6 API in order to emulate the responses that clients expect from a MongoDB server. It also comes with a “distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system” that can scale to 64 terabytes or trillions of bytes of data per cluster. As a result, customers need not worry about over-provisioning storage capacity.

Shawn Bice, vice president of nonrelational databases at AWS, said this unique storage system was the secret sauce that allows DocumentDB to run seamlessly on AWS’ cloud architecture.

“To meet developers’ needs, we looked at multiple different approaches to supporting MongoDB workloads and concluded that the best way to improve the customer experience was to build a new purpose-built document database from the ground up, while supporting the same MongoDB APIs that our customers currently use and like,” Bice said in a statement.

The DocumentDB service also provides greater resource efficiency, since it writes database changes only to the storage layer, thereby avoiding the need to replicate data across networks. Amazon said it has thrown in several additional optimizations such as advanced query processing and connection pooling that allow DocumentDB to deliver twice the throughput of the regular MongoDB database service. The service is said to offer 99.99 percent availability since it replicates six copies of customer data across three AWS availability zones.

Executives from MongoDB immediately called into question the validity of Amazon’s claims, however, dismissing DocumentDB as a poor man’s version of the original database.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it’s not surprising that Amazon would try to capitalize on the popularity and momentum of MongoDB’s document model,” MongoDB Chief Executive Officer Dev Ittycheria told SiliconANGLE. “However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market.”

Eliot Horowitz, MongoDB co-founder and chief technology officer, also weighed in, saying that Amazon’s DocumentDB offering is less capable because it’s “based on MongoDB code from two years ago.”

The executives added that MongoDB already offers a more fully featured and managed global cloud database-as-a-service called MongoDB Atlas that runs on AWS, as well as on rival cloud platforms Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Imitation or not, Amazon DocumentDB was built in line with Amazon’s standard approach to creating new services. That involves looking at how a product is operated and then building a new solution that combines the open-source aspects with AWS-specific features to reduce some of the pain points, Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE.

Still, Mueller said, “CxOs now need to balance the advantages that AWS has created over the potential lock in it risks, and make the best decision for their next-generation applications.”

A blog post by Amazon’s chief evangelist Jeff Barr explores how customers can get started with DocumentDB.

Image: Amazon