It's Big, It's Free, MongoDB on OpenShift Keeps Getting Better

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Sold on NoSQL? Excited to try out scalable and flexible storage for your application? If so, the OpenShift team has something very exciting news to announce today: MongoDB 2.0 is now available on OpenShift!

Support for Cool New Features

MongoDB 2.0 introduces a bunch of cool features like geospatial support, map reduce and enhancements to concurrency, journaling, indexes and querying to name a few. You can easily test drive these features in the cloud with a simple sign up and single line deployment.

Even Bigger Instances, for FREE!

When you sign up for OpenShift you get up to five, free 512 MB instances on which to deploy your applications and MongoDB. What's the catch? There is none. Getting started with MongoDB in the cloud is fast, free and easy!

Log Tailing

We've also added the ability tail MongoDB logs on OpenShift. Just because you're running on the cloud doesn't mean you don't want to audit what is going on at any given time. You get the best of both worlds here: Simplicity and economy by outsourcing the platform to us, but also visibility and feedback as if MongoDB was running locally.

Snapshots

Also, in this release is the ability to snapshot MongoDB. With a few simple commands you can backup and restore MongoDB instances running on OpenShift. Don't worry about filesystems and dump commands and whatever - let OpenShift just do it for you.

RockMongo Web GUI

We've made it easy to manage MongoDB on OpenShift with the ability to deploy the RockMongo web administration GUI with a single command.

What's Next?

Plenty more cool MongoDB enhancements are expected in OpenShift in the coming weeks. First, we plan to integrate the MongoDB Shell into the OpenShift command-line tools so that you can interact and administer both your applications and MongoDB from the same prompt. Next, we anticipate integrating OpenShift with the MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS) offered by our friends at 10Gen. This simple but powerful service allows you to keep an eye on your MongoDB and visually check its pulse at any point, displaying a rich set of key performance indicators and much more.

As you may have noticed, these additions, plus some recently released features (like continuous integration and builds on the cloud) are reaffirming OpenShift's commitment to providing the most compelling MongoDB experience on the cloud. This is not a coincidence, I believe there are certain benefits that only surface by combining Scalable Document-Oriented Data Stores, cloud and PaaS technologies. Consider:

• Isn't the PaaS application paradigm similar to the value proposition of the Document-Oriented data stores, in which you start by considering the application's data persistence needs and then think about data storage as a malleable repository? In both cases you don't have to focus on structure up front - you can focus on functionality first.

• Isn't the schema-free concept in the NoSQL world as liberating as the concept of infrastructure abstraction in PaaS?

• Aren't scaling in Big Data and scaling in PaaS sharing the same principles?

• Isn't cloud abstraction's value proposition as intriguing as the abstraction achieved by decoupling applications logic from a flexible, elastic and scalable data persistence layer?

I am making explicit the connections between Document-Oriented Data Stores, cloud, and PaaS and stressing my fascination about the fact that the combined whole can offer much more than the sum of each of the three technologies individually. This is the vision that we are working to materialize through our MongoDB roadmap in OpenShift, the idea is bringing the power, simplicity, and synergy of this cloud trifecta in a convenient PaaS.

If you are at Mongo Silicon Valley today, make sure to check out Mark Atwood's talk at noon. He's going to present how to deploy a Python Twitter clone with a MongoDB back-end on OpenShift plus demo all the cool new features in today's release.

Can't make it to the show? Then check out these blogs and videos that cover many of the features in greater technical detail.

"What's New in OpenShift - Dec 9, 2011" blog and video.

"Deploying a PHP Twitter App in the Cloud with MongoDB & OpenShift" blog and video.

"Deploying Python Apps in the Cloud with MongoDB & OpenShift" blog and video.

"How to Manage MongoDB on OpenShift with Your Favorite Admin Tool" blog and video.

Please keep bringing your valuable feedback through the forums and Twitter, we use them as one of the input mechanisms to influence the OpenShift roadmap.