2019: The year in review for Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)

We started 2019 by launching Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) on January 9, 2019. Since Day 1, we have been humbled by the feedback that we have received from you. We spent our time in 2019 working backward from the capabilities that you want us to add to the service while continuing to improve the availability, scale, and performance of the service.

The following 2019 releases are organized alphabetically by category and then by dated releases, with the most recent release at the top of each category. Use this handy post to catch up or remind yourself about what happened with Amazon DocumentDB in 2019—and that’s in addition to the functionality Amazon DocumentDB launched with that you might not be aware of. Let me know @josephidziorek if you have questions.

Compliance

Amazon DocumentDB was designed to meet the highest security standards and to make it easy for you to verify our security and meet your own regulatory and compliance obligations. Amazon DocumentDB has been assessed to comply with PCI DSS, ISO 9001, 27001, 27017, and 27018, and SOC 1, 2, and 3 in addition to being HIPAA eligible.

May 22: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is now SOC 1, 2, and 3 compliant
With this announcement, Amazon DocumentDB is now SOC 1, 2, and 3 compliant.
December 13: 55 additional AWS services achieve HITRUST CSF Certification
Amazon DocumentDB is now in scope under our latest Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) Common Security Framework (CSF) certification.

Cost optimization

The Amazon DocumentDB decoupled storage and compute architecture enables you to run single-instance clusters for nonproduction environments without impacting your data’s durability. Instances are not data bearing and your data is replicated six ways across three Availability Zones, regardless of how many instances you have.

May 9: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports per-second billing
Your Amazon DocumentDB instances are now billed in one-second increments. You still pay for only the capacity you use.
July 2: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Now Supports Stopping and Starting Clusters
Stopping and starting clusters makes it easier and more cost effective for you to use Amazon DocumentDB clusters for development and test purposes where the cluster is not required to be running all the time. While your cluster is stopped, you are charged for cluster storage, manual snapshots, and automated backup storage within your specified retention window, but not for instance hours.

Cluster management

Amazon DocumentDB launched with continuous backups enabled with one-day retention by default. You can increase the backup retention period for up to 35 days, and take snapshots at any time for long-term archiving. Amazon DocumentDB backups are automatic, incremental, and continuous and have no impact on cluster performance.

July 3: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Now Provides Cluster Deletion Protection
Cluster deletion protection helps you prevent against accidentally deleting a cluster. When a cluster is configured with deletion protection, the cluster cannot be deleted by any user.

Instance types

Amazon DocumentDB launched with support for R4 instances, and shortly after, the service added support for R5 instances in all available AWS Regions. R5 instances can provide up to 100 percent better performance over R4 instance for the same instance cost. As always, testing with your queries and data will give you the most accurate information about the improvements you’ll see for your workloads. With R5 instances, you can scale to r5.24xlarge instances that have 96 vCPU, 768 GiB of memory, and 25 Gbps network performance. If you’re running on R4 instances today, you should modify your instances to use R5 instances by using the AWS CLI or AWS Management Console.

May 17: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports R5 instances in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland)
Launch (January 9, 2019):
- Press release: AWS Announces Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility)
- Jeff Barr Blog post: New – Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility): Fast, Scalable, and Highly Available
- AWS Database Blog post: How to use Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) to build and manage applications at scale
- AWS DMS: AWS Database Migration Service Now Supports Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility as a target

MongoDB compatibility

Amazon DocumentDB is compatible with the MongoDB 3.6 API, and a vast majority of the applications, drivers, and tools you already use today with your MongoDB database can be used with Amazon DocumentDB with little or no change. Amazon DocumentDB does not support every MongoDB API or operator, but we continually work backwards from our customers and implement the functionality that you want us to build. Over the course of the year, we have regularly increased compatibility for the functionality that you care about the most. Here is the current list of supported MongoDB APIs, operations, and data types as well as the functional differences between Amazon DocumentDB and MongoDB. In 2020, we’ll continue to deliver the capabilities you care about on a regular cadence.

February 28: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports new features for aggregations, arrays, and indexing
The new capabilities include aggregation string operators ($concat, $substr, $substrBytes, $substrCP, $strcasecmp), an array aggregation operator ($size), an aggregation group accumulator operator ($push), and aggregation stages ($redact and $indexStats). Additionally, Amazon DocumentDB now supports positional array operators ($[] and $[<identifier>]) for updating elements in an array and hint() for selecting an index.
April 4: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds Aggregation Pipeline Capabilities for Strings, Dates, and Sampling
The new capabilities include seven aggregation string operators ($indexOfCP, $indexOfBytes, $strLenCP, $strLenBytes, $toLower, $toUpper, and $split), nine date time operators ($dayOfYear, $dayOfMonth, $dayOfWeek, $year, $month, $hour, $minute, $second, and $millisecond), and the $sample aggregation pipeline stage.
August 1: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Adds Aggregation Pipeline and Diagnostics Capabilities
The new capabilities include $in, $isoWeek, $isoWeekYear, $isoDayOfWeek, and $dateToString aggregation operators and the $addToSet aggregation stage. Amazon DocumentDB also added support for the top() command for collection-level diagnostics and the ability to modify the expireAfterSeconds parameter for Time to Live indexes using the collMod() command.
August 19: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds support for slow query logging
Amazon DocumentDB added support for logging slow queries via the query profiler. The profiler is useful for monitoring the slowest queries on your cluster to help you improve individual query and overall cluster performance.
October 15: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds additional Aggregation Pipeline Capabilities including $lookup
The new capabilities include both the $lookup and $addFields aggregation pipeline stages as well as the $concatArrays aggregation pipeline operator.
October 23: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Adds Support for Change Streams
The change streams feature provides a time-ordered sequence of update events that occur within your cluster’s collections and databases. You can read from the change stream to implement use cases such as change notifications, cross-region replication, full text search with Amazon OpenSearch Service, and analytics with Amazon Redshift integration.

Regions

Amazon DocumentDB launched on January 9 with support for the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions. Over the course of the year, we launched in nine additional Regions and are now available in 13 Regions worldwide. To find the most up-to-date list, see the AWS Services Region Table.

Security

At launch, Amazon DocumentDB supported encrypting your data at rest using keys you create and control through AWS Key Management Service (KMS), encrypted-in-transit with TLS, and support for Amazon VPC, which allows you to isolate your cluster in your own virtual network.

February 12: Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports database auditing with Amazon CloudWatch Logs
With auditing enabled, Amazon DocumentDB will record Data Definition Language (DDL), authentication, authorization, and user management events to Amazon CloudWatch Logs
March 15: Use AWS Secrets Manager to Rotate Credentials for Amazon DocumentDB and Amazon Redshift
With AWS Secrets Manager, you can rotate credentials for Amazon DocumentDB automatically.

As I mentioned, it is still Day 1 for the Amazon DocumentDB team, and we look forward to delivering more capabilities for you in 2020 and beyond.

About the Author

Joseph Idziorek is a Principal Product Manager at Amazon Web Services.