Announcing Public Cloud Databases! starting with MongoDB this week

I’ve been dreaming about writing this blog post for almost 4 years, and today is finally the big day!

We’ve just started providing managed databases as a service in our Public Cloud offer, starting with the wonderful MongoDB engine.

Many others will follow in the coming months. This means so much to us and also for you, our fellow customers. Let me tell you what’s going on.

OVHcloud and databases, a long love-story

If you ask any company around the world about their most critical services in their architecture, there is no doubt that databases will be at the epicenter, almost as critical as the coffee machine 😀. Your data is usually at the heart of your use cases, your websites and applications, your company business.

What’s not so obvious is pushing your data in safe databases. Installing MySQL, for example, is one thing. However, doing it state-of-the-art with strong security, resiliency, and performance is another. It takes knowledge and patience.

That’s why today every cloud provider is building managed databases services with one goal: to free customers from the hard stuff – setup, security, high-availability, monitoring, backups, updates, …

Since we host more than 3 million websites with more than 1.5 million databases behind them, we have solid knowledge and experience of databases (curious ? more details here !). Same for our internal databases clusters, it’s a love story. But up until now, nothing had been provided to our customers in our Public Cloud.

Databases: a missing brick in our Public Cloud ecosystem, now resolved!

If you’re not familiar with the public cloud, I’ll sum it up quickly: you start a new project, add a payment method, then you’re able to launch multiple and various services (such as virtual machines, storage, big data and machine learning platforms) … and at the end of the month, you only pay for what you consumed (per hour or per minute).

It’s called “Public” because some parts, like network equipment or physical servers, is shared with other customers (unlike a Private Cloud). It’s secure. No one has access except for you. But isolation is mostly made with software.

So, back on topic, we launched our OVHcloud Public Cloud over 6 years ago, and have improved our inner ecosystem brick by brick, month by month, year by year. We started with virtual machines, block storage, object storage, cold storage, then added containers (Kubernetes clusters, private registries, ), then network (load balancers, ..) then big data and AI/machine learning, but one major brick was missing: managed databases.

To be fully transparent, we were thinking about it for a very long time, around 4 years if I’m correct. We felt like Indiana Jones trying to avoid traps during the Holy Grail quest. A long and treacherous path. But why so long ?

Well, data volumetry is growing faster than ever, usages are multiplying exponentially, same for the solutions to store and use them. About 10-15 years ago it was about classic domination, like Oracle, MS SQL server, PostgreSQL and MySQL and voila. Four years ago things were way more divided and complex, as Redis, MongoDb, Cassandra, ElasticSearch were already in high demand.

We feel kind of like spectators of a moving landscape, it’s moving so fast that it’s hard to catch up. Don’t blink or you’ll miss something! 😉

Four years ago, we wanted to provide, not only 1 or 2 databases engines, but the most appreciated by our customers, the most requested and loved by communities, and it’s quite complex. Each of them has their own method to security, to perform backups, to setup high resiliency, to manage users and roles, to perform updates, requirement of various hardware, … a brain teaser when you want to industrialise it!

To catch up with the market, we needed to find the best companies outside of OVHcloud to help us on this quest.

We found MongoDB Inc, providing not only a databases engine, but also high quality tools and support to help customers (and cloud providers like OVHcloud) to deploy, maintain and monitor large MongoDB infrastructures. From day one, it worked fast and (furiously) resilient by design.

Introducing MongoDB offers this week, and right now it’s free!

Yeah! Yay! Woohoo! We are thrilled to announce managed databases services in our public cloud, now with MongoDB! That’s really good news.

In just a few clicks (or 1 API call) you’ll have a managed MongoDB cluster with a Community or Enterprise licence, delivered in under 5 minutes. We are one of the few cloud providers worldwide to deliver official MongoDB software, not a fork, as a service.

We even created three service plans to aide you on your journey: Essential, Business and Critical. Full details on the website!

And you know what? It’s free during the Beta phase (100% free, excluding official support or SLA, not qualified for production). Just connect to our OVHcloud control panel and launch Essential or Business MongoDB clusters. Enterprises ones will be available shortly after, in July.

As an OVHcloud customer, you’ll be able to focus on your core business, and rely on us for all your database infrastructure and maintenance needs.

We will take care of the rest like setup, installation, security and then maintain these services operationally.

Don’t get me wrong: you’re still responsible for your own data and your queries. It’s not magic. But we’ll take care of the infrastructure part, which is oh so nice. We added extra features such as daily backup (archived in another geographical region), high availability (MongoDB replica set), and public or private network (vRack). We’ll have more features soon too! For example, observability tools are currently underway and in development.

But what about other database engines?

MySql, PostgreSQL, Redis, Cassandra, M3db, Kafka, ElasticSearch,  … How appealing does this list look!? 😀

Even more good news! We’ve also teamed up with a pure player in the databases field as a technological partner for Public Cloud Databases and streaming tools. This means that MongoDB is not only a serious first step, but in a few short months we will add even more engines!

Their core-business is doing databases and they handle it like no one else. We will be able to catch up and provide to you, our customers, a much bigger and better Public Cloud portfolio. They will simplify industrialization and all the engine-related specifics.

Do not worry! We will come back here at the end of June to share our tips and tricks and lovely insight.

We really hope that you’ll enjoy this new adventure with OVHcloud. Try for yourself and please share your feedback on OVHcloud Discord #database-MongoDB!