Amazon DocumentDB is a NoSQL JSON document database service with a limited degree of compatibility with MongoDB.
DocumentDB is not based on the MongoDB server and runs no MongoDB code. Rather it emulates the MongoDB API, and runs on top of Amazon’s proprietary back-end platform. This creates significant architectural constraints, functionality limitations, and broken compatibility.
It is supported only on AWS and limited to up to 64TB of storage per cluster. The instance sizes start only from 4GB RAM and 2 CPUs.
MongoDB offers the fully managed, on-demand, and global MongoDB Atlas service, in a public cloud of your choice. Atlas enables customers to deploy, operate, and scale MongoDB databases on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or any combination of those three. MongoDB Atlas is available through a pay-as-you-go model and billed on an hourly basis. It’s easy to get started—use a simple GUI or programmatic API calls to select the public cloud provider, region, instance size, and features you need. MongoDB Atlas provides:
Built and run by the same team that develops the MongoDB Database, MongoDB Atlas is the best way to run MongoDB apps.
The following high-level diagram compares a potential application stack using DocumentDB or MongoDB as their Data-as-a-Service tier.
The key differences between DocumentDB and MongoDB’s on-demand, elastic, and fully managed Atlas service are summarized below.
For additional MongoDB Atlas comparison information, please refer to the following section.
DocumentDB claims to support the MongoDB 4.0 API, which implies that it is at parity with MongoDB v4.0, released back in June 2018. In actual fact, the DocumentDB 4.0 feature set still closely resembles early MongoDB 3.0 and 3.2, released in 2015, and compatibility testing reveals it fails 66% of the MongoDB API correctness tests. Applications written for MongoDB will need to be rewritten to work with Amazon DocumentDB. However, since DocumentDB emulates a MongoDB API, applications written for DocumentDB can be easily migrated into MongoDB Atlas.
Interested in migrating from DocumentDB to MongoDB Atlas? Please refer to our migration guide.
Interested in up-to-date results on DocumentDB's compatibility with the MongoDB API? Get the latest results at Is DocumentDB Really MongoDB?
Try MongoDB Atlas for free for a real MongoDB experience.
No. DocumentDB is an Amazon database service with a partially compatible emulation of an old MongoDB API.
For more on this, check out https://isdocumentdbreallymongodb.com.