Jeff Bezos released his annual shareholder letter this morning. It’s an easy short read, especially worthwhile for those of you like myself that still own a large stake in AMZN
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2018-letter-to-sha…
One of the things I noted, is that he spends two of his twenty-three paragraphs talking about Amazon’s AWS database offerings, and mentions DynamoDB multiple times, yet he doesn’t mention DocumentDB once.
He does mention that relational databases are sometimes not ideal, but not anything specifically about DocumentDB. Makes me wonder if it hasn’t been that successful so far and he wants to temper his enthusiasm rather than rah rah’ing something now, that was greeted with a lot of press when originally released, but may not be significant going forward.
I’m very possibly likely reading too much into it. If he hadn’t spent so much of the letter on databases, I wouldn’t even mention it. But he did, and DocumentDB is nowhere to be seen.
Might not mean anything for MDB, but certainly can’t be bad.
…we invented DynamoDB, a highly scalable, low latency key-value database now used by thousands of AWS customers. And on the listening carefully-to-customers side, we heard loudly that companies felt constrained by their commercial database options and had been unhappy with their database providers for decades – these offerings are expensive, proprietary, have high-lock-in and punitive licensing terms. We spent several years building our own database engine, Amazon Aurora, a fully-managed MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible service with the same or better durability and availability as the commercial engines, but at one-tenth of the cost. We were not surprised when this worked.
But we’re also optimistic about specialized databases for specialized workloads. Over the past 20 to 30 years, companies ran most of their workloads using relational databases. The broad familiarity with relational databases among developers made this technology the go-to even when it wasn’t ideal. Though sub-optimal, the data set sizes were often small enough and the acceptable query latencies long enough that you could make it work. But today, many applications are storing very large amounts of data – terabytes and petabytes. And the requirements for apps have changed. Modern applications are driving the need for low latencies, real-time processing, and the ability to process millions of requests per second. It’s not just key-value stores like DynamoDB, but also in-memory databases like Amazon ElastiCache, time series databases like Amazon Timestream, and ledger solutions like Amazon Quantum Ledger Database – the right tool for the right job saves money and gets your product to market faster.
-mekong