MongoHQ is proof that a successful startup can be created anywhere and grow anywhere. Proud of these guys and they probably have the most unique office space/location of any startup in Alabama.
We're currently on DynamoDB, and it has given us some real headaches, so I wish these guys luck! Amazon iterates quickly (well, quickly for a megacorp) so we're still hopeful about seeing improvements.
Yeah, I've considered that before. Thanks for the suggestion. If you want me to ping you when I get around to writing it, drop me an email (address is in my profile).
Congrats to the MongoHQ team!! I remember when they first launched their service a couple of years ago I was like... wow why are they doing that? Now I'm like, wow... why DIDN'T I do that?? :-) All the best dudes!
No disrespect whatsoever to MongoHQ, but I'm skeptical that there will ever be a big market for database as a service.
These are all niche, and likely to remain so:
- Companies willing to use public cloud;
- Companies willing to adopt NoSQL;
- Companies willing to move production data outside of their control;
- Companies who would rather not manage their production database.
Operating in any one of those niches is challenging, let alone at the intersection of all of them.
Public clouds are not a niche service and to say companies will never adopt nosql even as they improve every day is a very strong statement. Companies don't want to manage their databases; they just want uptime, performance and control (which in the past implies direct management), but this is exactly what MongoHQ is offering and why they will succeed.
Theyre all getting traction in certain niches, but 99 out of 100 companies are going to be very skeptical about using something like this and ill wager it will take years for that to change.
Looking at EC2 or a NoSQL solution in isolation maybe, but I know that if i suggested NoSQL database as a service to most of my customers for their production data I would be laughed out of the building.
There's a lot of pressure working in our favor. There's pressure from (increasingly powerful) developers to use specialized DBs to solve specialized problems. There's pressure to do more with less operations people, DBAs in particular since they're exceptionally difficult to hire. And there's pressure to get things running more quickly.
Anyway, we think we're in a pretty good spot. We could be entirely wrong, though.
I think there's a stage where companies can get huge value from using "as a service" products. Sure it's initially more expensive but the risk to your business is the product and market, not really the exact economics.
As you scale you can then start building your own datacenters to decrease your costs, place a higher value on security, etc.
I've used MongoHQ in two companies now, and couldn't be happier with their product, uptime, and ridiculously responsive support (especially during late-night, crap-I-just-dropped-our-staging-database-by-accident-because-I-ran-unit-tests-on-the-wrong-environment routines). Very happy for their success so far, and looking forward to what they have in the pipeline.
Between Mongo and Heroku, we've been able to stay small and super focused on functionality, which is by far the best use of our time. Paying these guys a few hundred$ a month is just way cheaper than my engineering team spending mind share on being good database admins.
What does this comment even mean? MongoHQ was one of something like 60 companies in its batch. YC doesn't control Trinity; Trinity is one of the older VC's in the valley.
There's a lot more to running a production database than simply installing the software. At a minimum you have monitoring, tuning, backups, failover/replication, and security. These and more are all tasks that some people look to outsource as it is outside of their core competency/business (for better or worse).
Amazon Web Services itself has three distinct services [1] for database as a service: SDB (2007), RDS (2009), and DynamoDB (2012). If there wasn't demand or money in it, I'm sure they would have stopped at their first, simplest iteration.
The over-simplistic response to that argument is that setting up a website is as simple as 'sudo apt-get install nginx && service start nginx', which delivers in principle -- now you have a website. In practice, we all know there's much more involved.
With some of the more spectacular failures we've seen as a result of Mongo (I'm specifically thinking of FourSquare's downtimes), I think that their offering is quite timely and useful.
We're currently mulling over the options between switching our local Mongo installs to either MongoHQ or engaging 10Gen support to manage it for us. Both are significantly cheaper than hiring a dedicated person to manage it.
Many years ago, people asked the same questions about food, clothing, shelter, farming, weapons, mining, steel, oil, gas, electricity, sewer systems, telephone networks, radio, television, and the internet.
MongoHQ has a licensing agreement with 10gen for the name. Plus, as already mentioned, MongoHQ works very closely with 10gen to not only promote the use of MongoDB, but to improve MongoDB as a database product.
I believe that the same could be said for MongoLab, a similar service.
I also believe that both services need to be certified by 10gen before rolling out new releases. Also, paying customers at a certain level have access to 10gen for support if the provider can't address the issue.
Long story short, both these companies have a good relationship with 10gen in the interest of growing the space.
