MongoDB 6.0: Should You Upgrade Now?

MongoDB 6.0: Should You Upgrade Now?

MongoDB is a cross-platform, document-oriented NoSQL database. It has been developed as an answer to the growing need for easy-to-use yet very performant, scalable, and content-agnostic storage. MongoDB has been widely adopted by engineers across application development anywhere from banking to social media. Unfortunately, after MongoDB Inc.’s IPO in 2017, they chose an aggressive path of monetization, changing the license to SSPL (which is a license model that’s bad for you) and promoting Atlas (MongoDB’s Database as a Service (DBaaS) solution) even over the costly MongoDB Enterprise. The company put the community’s user needs way behind catering to high-end enterprise customers, leaving the MongoDB community stranded.

While limited by the SSPL license (not recognized by the Open Standards Initiative (OSI) as open source), Percona, known for its deep commitment to open source software, chose to come with support to the stranded MongoDB community by:

• Providing Percona Server for MongoDB (PSMDB) – a source-available MongoDB drop-in replacement database based on MongoDB Community Edition (CE) yet adding enterprise features developed on top of that by Percona.
  • Let’s also remember that while MongoDB Inc. chose to move the MongoDB CE to SSPL effective immediately, not respectful of the compliance and approval processes their users had to face, Percona, unlike MongoDB Inc, chose to still provide patches to the AGPL-based versions that remained open source.
• Delivering a freely available open source product for MongoDB backup and recovery: Percona Backup for MongoDB (PBM) works with PSMDB as well as (to some extent) with MongoDB Inc.’s MongoDB Community and Enterprise editions.
• Packaging PSMDB and PBM in Percona Distribution for MongoDB: an easy-to-deploy complete solution for MongoDB.
• Providing Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM), which can be used as an open source, multi-database alternative to MongoDB Ops Manager.
• Developing a MongoDB Prometheus exporter, free to use for anyone (from Grafana, through Ansible to Dynatrace) needing insights into how their MongoDB instance is doing that’s widely used in the industry both by the open source communities and enterprise APM tools.
• Delivering a Percona Operator for MongoDB, a complete solution for containerized environments of your Percona Server for MongoDB, containing the necessary Kubernetes settings to maintain consistent PSMDB instance (if you’re unsure whether running MongoDB in Kubernetes is for you, check out pros and cons of solutions for that).

I think it’s fair to say that the list is impressive. Individuals, organizations, and even enterprises benefit from the fact that the software Percona provides is free and open.

A bittersweet edition

Seeing all the critical bugs that MongoDB 5.0 has introduced, it feels as if its release has been rushed, allowing for half-baked features to go GA. Looking at numerous critical problems that could result in data corruption, you could still argue that it’s a natural state of things in IT development, to quote Albert Einstein:

a person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.

True point, but following the story by The Register, is not an argument I’d use here. The “accelerated release cadence” introduced by MongoDB Inc. assumes that major improvements are released in “rapid releases” available only for Atlas (DBaaS) customers. Neither MongoDB Community nor even MongoDB Enterprise customers will get a taste of those improvements in 5.0.x, even though they have a chance to taste all the instabilities, limitations, and bugs available with 5.0.

Of course, MongoDB Inc will argue that the Rapid Releases are for the bleeding edge adopters, that they include new features, whereas all the issues are fixed in the bugfix, patchset releases. From my experience, not only bug fixes solve user issues. Think of the release cycle and the situations where, due to the deadlines, some features are released in the major version in a limited scope. It does sound all too familiar, right? Now that’s not that bad, as (with semantic versioning) minor versions will fill in the missing capabilities, lift the limitations, and make the often go-to-market spotlight features of the major version complete. Not in this case, at least not if you are the “second class citizen user” of the Community or Enterprise edition. Rapid Releases are what semantic versioning calls minor releases. Meaning you have to live with the limitations and lacking features till the next major release, for now having to satisfy with the bug-fix holding patches only.

Consider that MongoDB 5.0 introduced very appealing capabilities like time-series collections or resharding that allows for an automatic changing of a shard-key for a collection. Choosing a good shard-key during the application design when the initial sharding takes place is often challenging. Having a poorly designed sharding in your database means everything to MongoDB’s performance. For now, to change it, a manual and cumbersome process has been needed. Even taking into account the downfalls of the introduced resharding like performance and storage overhead during the process, it is still a very tempting feature that for many situations could be a game changer. Unfortunately, with a lack of trust in MongoDB 5.0 and the new release cadence not having the community’s back, the community often simply cannot benefit from it.

Percona has waited a long time for the release of 5.0 to feel stable enough to release. It was not until MongoDB 5.0.6 CE was released almost half a year after 5.0.0 that Percona decided it was safe enough for our users and customers. This sort of third-party overwatch is an invaluable asset that open source brings. With companies like Percona standing behind a software release, you get the added benefit of extra verification of your software “for free”.

End-of-life strategy

Looking at the previous chapter, the adoption of releases of 5.0 being not as impressive as one could expect is not that surprising. As this blog post is being written, the telemetry data gathered by Percona shows:

• MongoDB 4.4 = 47%
• MongoDB 4.2 = 17%
• MongoDB 5.0 = 15%
• MongoDB 4.0 = 13%

With the end-of-life calendar MongoDB 4.x looking as follows:

• 4.0 EOL April 2022
• 4.2 EOL April 2023
• 4.4 EOL April 2024

Add in the apparent lack of trust in 5.0, we see a growing trend for the adoption of MongoDB 4.4 that gives some “breathing space” until the EOL.

That’s a fair strategy that makes sense, but limits the value you are getting. What if there was another way that could allow you to get some more benefits?

Here comes Percona Server for MongoDB 6.0

With the introduction of MongoDB 6.0, users got long-awaited improvements and usability fixes to MongoDB 5.0 that only the Atlas customers could taste before. After the EOL of major versions that required users to upgrade, 6.0 could become their landing zone. This way users can benefit from more advanced features of the new version as well as a later EOL.

A quick look at the features that made it to MongoDB 6.0 shows a range of interesting ones, like:

• Cluster to cluster sync
• Queryable encryption
• Time-series collections improvements
• Analytics improvements
• Change streams improvements
• New aggregation operators
• Improved search

Obviously, not all of these will make it to MongoDB Community Edition, since some are reserved for MongoDB Enterprise or even Atlas only.

Even without the features not available in the Community Edition, the 6.0 release providing fixes over the unstable 5.0 is a large improvement that’s worth considering in your long-time update strategy.

While updating your Community Edition, it’s worth considering migrating from MongoDB CE to Percona Server for MongoDB. This way you have all the benefits of MongoDB CE 6.0 plus the advantages that Percona brings to the release cycle for the community. With the upcoming release of Percona Server for MongoDB 6.0, as well as the freshly released Percona Backup for MongoDB 2.0 and the support of PBM in Percona Monitoring and Management, the solution becomes complete. With features like an in-memory engine, extensive data at rest encryption, hot backups, LDAP, and Kerberos integration on top of what MongoDB Community Edition already provides, PDMDB provides a complete solution that Percona is committed to keeping open. Be on the lookout for the announcement of PSMDB 6.0 very soon!

What now?

We see over the years that companies change their licenses, becoming less open source while claiming to be more open in an obvious marketing play. At its core, Percona chooses to stay true to the open source philosophy.

Over the years, Percona experts have meticulously delivered increments of Percona Server for MongoDB based on the same upstream codebase as the MongoDB Community Edition. As a drop-in replacement for MongoDB CE, it’s the enterprise features like these that PSMDB adds on top of it that make it so interesting:

• in-memory storage engine,
• KMIP support,
• HashiCorp Vault integration,
• data-at-rest encryption,
• audit logging,
• external LDAP authentication with SASL,
• hot backups.

These enterprise-grade feature enhancements were added to Percona Server for MongoDB. This way the open source community could benefit from features previously reserved only for MongoDB Enterprise customers. With PSMDB 6.0, things are not going to change. Percona is on a mission to provide open database solutions to everyone and everywhere. With this in mind, we are open to your suggestions as to which features are the most important to you, our users. Reach out and let us know!

Learn more about Percona Server for MongoDB