Skip to main content

Announcing Amazon DocumentDB Elastic Clusters

Published Date
Author Veliswa Boya

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a scalable, highly durable, and fully managed database service for operating mission-critical JSON workloads. It is one of AWS fast-growing services with customers including BBC, Dow Jones, and Samsung relying on Amazon DocumentDB to run their JSON workloads at scale.

Today I am excited to announce the general availability of Amazon DocumentDB Elastic Clusters. Elastic Clusters enables you to elastically scale your document database to handle virtually any number of writes and reads, with petabytes of storage capacity. Elastic Clusters simplifies how customers interact with Amazon DocumentDB by automatically managing the underlying infrastructure and removing the need to create, remove, upgrade, or scale instances.

A Few Concepts about Elastic Clusters
Sharding – A popular database concept also known as partitioning, sharding splits large data sets into smaller data sets across multiple nodes enabling customers to scale out their database beyond vertical scaling limits. Elastic Clusters uses sharding to partition data across Amazon DocumentDB’s distributed storage system. 

Elastic Clusters – Elastic Clusters is Amazon DocumentDB clusters that allow you to scale your workload’s throughput to millions of writes/reads per second and storage to petabytes. Elastic Clusters comprises one or more shards each of which has its own compute and storage volume. It is highly available across three Availability Zones (AZs) by default, with six copies of your data replicated across these three AZs. You can create Elastic Clusters using the Amazon DocumentDB API, AWS SDK, AWS CLI, AWS CloudFormation, or the AWS console.

Scale Workloads with Little to No Impact – With Elastic Clusters, your database can scale to millions of operations with little to no downtime or performance impact.

Integration with Other AWS Services – Elastic Clusters integrates with other AWS services in the same way Amazon DocumentDB does today. First, you can monitor the health and performance of your Elastic Clusters using Amazon CloudWatch. Second, you can set up authentication and authorization for resources such as clusters through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users and roles and use Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for secure VPC-only connections. Last, you can use AWS Glue to import and export data from and to other AWS services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Getting Started with Elastic Clusters
Previously, I mentioned that you can use either the AWS console, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK to create Elastic Clusters. In the examples below, we will look at how you can create a cluster, scale up or out, and scale in or down using the AWS CLI:

Create a Cluster
When creating a cluster, you will specify the vCPUs that you want for your Elastic Clusters at provisioning. With the size of vCPUs that you provision, you will also get a proportionate amount of memory, expressed in vCPUs. Elastic Clusters automatically provisions the necessary infrastructure (shards and instances) on your behalf.
aws docdb-elastic create-cluster
--cluster-name foo
--shard-capacity 2
--shard-count 4
--auth-type PLAIN_TEXT
--admin-user-name docdbelasticadmin
--admin-user-password password

Scale Up or Out
If you need more compute and storage to handle an increase in traffic, modify the shard-count parameter. Elastic Clusters scales the underlying infrastructure up or out to give you additional compute and storage capacity.
aws docdb-elastic update-cluster
--cluster-arn foo-arn
--shard-count 8

Scale In or Down
If you no longer need the compute and storage that you currently have provisioned, either due to a decline in database traffic or the fact that you originally over-provisioned, modify the shard-count parameter. Elastic Clusters scales the underlying infrastructure in or down.
aws docdb-elastic update-cluster
--cluster-arn foo-arn
--shard-count 4

General Availability of Elastic Clusters for Amazon DocumentDB
Amazon DocumentDB Elastic Clusters is now available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland). To learn more, visit the Amazon DocumentDB page.

– Veliswa x