A VC - Latest Comments in Hosted Mongo

Re: Hosted Mongo

Prasanna Krishnan — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:28:41 -0000

We’re doing a webinar on MongoDB on Oct 30. It’ll be an overview of MongoDB, and will also have Ian White from Business Insider talking about how they are using MongoDB in production. This should answer some of the questions people posted here on MongoDB vs other databases, understanding production use cases etc.

Details & registration at: http://mongodb1.eventbrite....

If you have ideas for future webinars, which could be to share an interesting way in which you are using MongoDB or to learn more about a specific aspect of MongoDB, we'd love to hear. Please share your thoughts in the comments or email us at info@10gen.com.

Re: Hosted Mongo

dmerriman — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:46:36 -0000

That's great to hear. By any chance could you blog about your usage of the product? We are getting a lot of questions about how people are using mongodb in the real world.

Re: Hosted Mongo

fredwilson — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:31:27 -0000

That is great to hear hunter. We are hearing more and more good things about mongo

Re: Hosted Mongo

Hunter Nield — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:33:11 -0000

I've been using MongoDB for a few projects recently. It's an incredible system for rapid web development and has proved very solid for serious production work. We've even managed to sneak it into a deployment for the local arm of a large Japanese automaker.

When I heard about MongoHQ I also signed up for the beta. As expected being an early release, a few rough edges but could be a great option in connection with other EC2 cloud solutions. As a test we've deployed an early prototype of a new app we're building. Very smooth going, if they can nail it with the price then it will be very appealing to go alongside services like Heroku or plain old EC2.

Re: Hosted Mongo

Mark Essel — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:19:49 -0000

Appreciate your shared experience in this area Kevin.

Re: Hosted Mongo

falicon — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:41:24 -0000

Most all of these key/value type databases (Mongo, SimpleDB, Google's Big table) are designed to solve just that pain point...right now the real question in picking one over another seems to be what company/environment you want to be tied to (ie. Google, Amazon, or your own hosting world)...and this directly relates to all the other tech. decisions you'll be making (like what language you want to work in, what your tech. budget long term is, what type of scale you expect to have to support, etc.)...

Re: Hosted Mongo

Mark Essel — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:33:48 -0000

I need to familiarize myself with setting up a nice scalable database. I'd rather use a system that handles most of the difficult work of keeping it fast no matter how much it bloats.

Re: Hosted Mongo

Mark Essel — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:24:59 -0000

I wasn't able to sign up, seems I need a special code?
edit: nevermind, found the request beta code link

Re: Hosted Mongo

fredwilson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:12:25 -0000

Wow. Thanks for sharing this. It is so great to hear stories like this

Re: Hosted Mongo

Laurent — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:10:35 -0000

Hi Fred,

We've been fairly involved with 10gen and the latest builds of MongoDB. It has been a key part of our elastic infrastructure since we launched a few weeks ago, fitting perfectly between the other providers that we use (namely MySQL and S3). Scaling smoothly, Silentale currently stores more than 8 million large items ("documents" for MongoDB) and grows by about 4% per day. The 10gen team has been absolutely fantastic in supporting us and moving forward with their roadmap. I really hope that the hosted version will stimulate more companies to use and contribute to MongoDB in production systems.

Laurent

Re: Hosted Mongo

fredwilson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:55:25 -0000

Exactly. That's why I blogged about it.

Re: Hosted Mongo

Mitch Pirtle — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:09:37 -0000

I think this is a great way to demonstrate the simplicity and power of Mongo. I was giving sessions at a JoomlaDay event in NYC on Monday, and when I described Mongo I got a lot of quizzical stares...

I whipped out my laptop and showed them the Mongo Shell, and suddenly lightbulbs were going off everywhere in the room.

This hosted service is going to be a great way for developers that are unsure of the value proposition of Mongo to kick the tires and see for themselves what Mongo can do.

Re: Hosted Mongo

eran shir — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:31:11 -0000

We really like mongodb, and actually use in a key piece of our infra. However, I'll be extremely surprised if the hosted offering will be used for anything serious. It's not only the networking latencies, cost and indeterministic performance. The main issue is that working in an architecture that is outsourced horizontally is extremely hard. Counter-intuitively as mongodb becomes more mature and robust, it becomes easier to deploy it and thus the incentive to use it in a saas model goes down.

What will work, however, is to create something like amazon images that provide value and are vertical specific, like cloudera is doing successfuly. a simple example will be a great geo based db that provides a complete location awareness solution.

Incidentally, one of the cool features of MongoDB is that it's open source. For example, today we found a bug in mongodb's handling of long vars somewhere by being able to dive into the code. Will be hard doing that in a saas model :)

Re: Hosted Mongo

im2b_dl — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:38:39 -0000

of course we can decouple it. We are a different situation. sorry

Re: Hosted Mongo

daryn — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:56:24 -0000

I don't understand what you're saying, but all of amazon's services are
decoupled: you can pick and choose and use any or all of them.

Here's an example of a 3rd party service that someone wrote to let you sell
digital goods using S3 as your document store, and paypal as your payment
gateway. Amazon doesn't discourage this, even though it could be done
entirely on their platform. In fact, it is one of the featured services in
the AWS showcase.

http://www.digitalgoodsstor...

Re: Hosted Mongo

im2b_dl — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:42:58 -0000

We are a different entity. ...that Amazon would like to see our retail/referral go through them.

Re: Hosted Mongo

daryn — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:26:14 -0000

How do S3 (or any of the amazon web services) put pressure on retail going through Amazon? They are backend platforms that have nothing to do with retail, and you could easily build a website using s3, sqs, simpledb, and ec2, but use paypal for your payments layer instead of amazon payments. You could even build your own internet bookstore on AWS if you wanted to...

What I like about the 10gen stuff is that you can use their sdk to develop scalable software, but potentially deploy it anywhere, whether on 10gen's cloud, some other hosting provider, or on your own hardware.

At a glance Mongo looks like a CouchDB / a hybrid of SimpleDB and S3, but I haven't needed to really dig in to any of them yet.

Re: Hosted Mongo

fredwilson — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:10:00 -0000

please do Ken

Re: Hosted Mongo

kenberger — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:08:08 -0000

Cool- I finally get to put on my East Agile hat on this blog without sounding pitchy :)

East Agile is an elite engineering team doing contract web and mobile development. We’d be happy to work with such an offering and off-load the DB heavy lifting that’s not really our core competency-- this comes up more and more as we work with clients' more robust and more spikey apps.

Hosted MongoDB's value prop seems similar to that of Engine Yard, who is probably the best solution out there for Ruby deployment and management (we are an EY development partner).

As it relates to startups' adoption, key to this is pricing model: Engine Yard just changed their pricing for smaller companies so the cost can start small and scale up if and when usage grows.

(We'll let you know how our Mongo usage goes.)

http://eastagile.com

Re: Hosted Mongo

fredwilson — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:46:29 -0000

that is great feedback. thanks so much.

Re: Hosted Mongo

ShanaC — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:50:17 -0000

So all this talk of databases is above my head. And I think that's silly when it comes to the market of databases.

I was talking to family friends very early this summer, at the first mention of the whole NoSQL movement. Not that I fully understand it. This family friend had used SQL and was looking for a change in life, she was in her late 40s-early 50s, and was looking to say try to learn SAP in some mysterious way. NoSQL hadn't even hit her radar, and it still really isn't, despite my insistence that it will.

One of the reasons is that the literature if you are just starting out is way above most people's heads. Aim to explain everything. At the most basic level. You'll capture a market no one else has yet (I mean, why would anyone else go for that market, we're just not that cool...)

Re: Hosted Mongo

Diego Sana — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:43:46 -0000

I discovered mongodb in a post you did here back in february and instantly fell in love with the concept. I've been using it in an under development app and i'm very pleased with the features and performance. Their mailing list (a google group) is very active and the founders/employees promptly answers all sorts of questions, and judging by myself and all the excitement i see there by people discovering mongo, i think you did a very nice investment on this one that will definitely pay off :)

I do host mongodb on my own dedicated server, but i think that the hosted offer on mongoqh is an excelent idea as many developers don't want/don't know/can't afford a dedicated hosted and usually go with a shared hosting where mysql is usually their only database option.

Re: Hosted Mongo

Julien — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:18:46 -0000

I think there is a huge trend for "on-demand" services, related to hosting. Of course S3 and EC2 set the trend, but we now how MongoHQ for databases, we have Superfeedr for RSS feed parsing on demand... etc.

Re: Hosted Mongo

ehwizard — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:58:06 -0000

Yes - going over the public net would be an issue. I think the best use case is in the same data center as the hosting service. Eventually, MongoHQ should have servers at the big hosting companies, so you just use the servers that are local to you.

Re: Hosted Mongo

BillSeitz — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:56:08 -0000

I'd have concerns about the overhead of every db hit from my app-server going over the public net.