The CTO of $4.4 billion MongoDB explains why he's 'not terribly worried' that Amazon’s cloud is encroaching on its turf with a new database (AMZN, MDB)

Eliot Horowitz

On Wednesday, Amazon Web Serivces announced DocumentDB — a new document database service that's compatible with MongoDB, a popular open source database.
In October, MongoDB — the $4.4 billion company behind the database of the same name — took defensive moves against larger cloud platforms taking and selling its software for profit without giving back.
AWS, in particular, has a reputation for profiting off of free software from smaller companies, while contributing little code to the companies.
"More than anything, it shows how much developers love the MongoDB API and DB and how desperate Amazon was to have something in this case," Eliot Horowitz, CTO and Co-Founder of MongoDB, told Business Insider.

On Wednesday, Amazon Web Services announced a new document database service, based on technology from $4.4 billion open source software company MongoDB — confirming previous reports that such a product was in the works.

This new service, DocumentDB, fully supports MongoDB workloads, and customers can use MongoDB tools to run their work on Amazon's cloud. Customers can also migrate their MongoDB databases to DocumentDB, where they'll pay only for the capacity they use, Amazon says.

Notably, this comes just months after MongoDB announced a new license to push back on cloud providers taking its trademark open source database software and using it to turn a profit. Amazon Web Services, in particular, has a reputation for selling free software from other smaller companies as a service, while contributing little code back to the open source community that makes it all possible.

But Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of MongoDB, tells Business Insider that he's not worried about this particular move from Amazon.

"While there has been some buzz, this is not something we're super surprised about or terribly worried about," Horowitz told Business Insider. "More than anything, it shows how much developers love the MongoDB API and DB and how desperate Amazon was to have something in this case."

Why MongoDB isn't worried

First off, Horowitz notes, Amazon DocumentDB is actually built to integrate with MongoDB 3.6 — a two-year-old version of the software. That's because in October, MongoDB announced a new license, called the Server Side Public License (SSPL), in response to Chinese tech giants like Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba repackaging and selling its free software.

Basically, the SSPL says that if a company wants to sell MongoDB's software, it has two options: It either has to release any new MongoDB-based software that it develops as free open source. Or, it has to pay MongoDB for a commercial license, at which point it can do whatever it wants.

Because of this license, Amazon Web Services can't use the source code from the most recent versions of MongoDB, which were built after the SSPL went into effect, for free. This means that Amazon chose to build most of DatabaseDB from scratch rather than basing it on MongoDB itself, and that it only integrated it with the older MongoDB 3.6.

"They could have [used our code] if they talked to or open sourced some of the stuff, but they didn't, so they can't use any Mongo code," Horowitz said.

Still, there's some overlap between the MongoDB and Amazon DocumentDB products. However, as part of the Amazon empire, it's easy and convenient for Amazon Web Services customers to set up and start running DocumentDB with just a few clicks, versus the relative difficulty of managing their own MongoDB servers. Still, MongoDB operates its own cloud database service, called Atlas.

“To meet developers’ needs, we looked at multiple different approaches to supporting MongoDB workloads and concluded that the best way to improve the customer experience was to build a new purpose-built document database from the ground up, while supporting the same MongoDB APIs that our customers currently use and like," Shawn Bice, vice president of Non-Relational Databases at AWS, said in a statement.

The competitive landscape

Microsoft Azure also offers a similar product to MongoDB, called Cosmos DB, which Horowitz says is in some ways competitive with MongoDB. However, he says, many customers find that MongoDB offers more features than Cosmos DB.

Horowitz believes that it will go the same way with the new Amazon database. Although DocumentDB is similar to MongoDB's cloud database, he says there are some feature gaps compared to MongoDB's enterprise product.

"DocumentDB is AWS trying to imitate MongoDB and specifically Atlas. They're trying to offer the same service as Atlas," Horowitz said. "It might work for some MongoDB applications but for some serious MongoDB applications it might not be the best choice."

There has been controversy over whether MongoDB's new license truly qualifies as open source, and is still seeking approval from the Open Source Initiative to use the term. Critics of the MongoDB SSPL say that it undermines the core foundation of open source, which is that anybody — even large corporations — can use the software as they wish.

MongoDB currently does not have plans to change its licensing or business model, and will continue looking into ways to protect its business, Horowitz told Business Insider.

"We're always looking at things to do to protect our IP and long term growth to the MongoDB ecosystem," Horowitz said.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Saturn is officially losing its rings — and they're disappearing much faster than scientists had anticipated