MongoDB gets a data lake, new security features and more

Published June 18, 2019

MongoDB is hosting its developer conference today and, unsurprisingly, the company has quite a few announcements to make. Some are straightforward, like the launch of MongoDB 4.2 with some important new security features, while others, like the launch of the company’s Atlas Data Lake, point the company beyond its core database product.

“Our new offerings radically expand the ways developers can use MongoDB to better work with data,” said Dev Ittycheria, the CEO and president of MongoDB. “We strive to help developers be more productive and remove infrastructure headaches — with additional features along with adjunct capabilities like full-text search and data lake. IDC predicts that by 2025 global data will reach 175 Zettabytes and 49% of it will reside in the public cloud. It’s our mission to give developers better ways to work with data wherever it resides, including in public and private clouds.”

The highlight of today’s set of announcements is probably the launch of MongoDB Atlas Data Lake. Atlas Data Lake allows users to query data, using the MongoDB Query Language, on AWS S3, no matter their format, including JSON, BSON, CSV, TSV, Parquet and Avro. To get started, users only need to point the service at their existing S3 buckets. They don’t have to manage servers or other infrastructure. Support for Data Lake on Google Cloud Storage and Azure Storage is in the works and will launch in the future.

Also new is Full-Text Search, which gives users access to advanced text search features based on the open-source Apache Lucene 8.

In addition, MongoDB is also now starting to bring together Realm, the mobile database product it acquired earlier this year, and the rest of its product lineup. Using the Realm brand, Mongo is merging its serverless platform, MongoDB Stitch, and Realm’s mobile database and synchronization platform. Realm’s synchronization protocol will now connect to MongoDB Atlas’ cloud database, while Realm Sync will allow developers to bring this data to their applications.

“By combining Realm’s wildly popular mobile database and synchronization platform with the strengths of Stitch, we will eliminate a lot of work for developers by making it natural and easy to work with data at every layer of the stack, and to seamlessly move data between devices at the edge to the core backend,” explained Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of MongoDB.

As for the latest release of MongoDB, the highlight of the release is a set of new security features. With this release, Mongo is implementing client-side Field Level Encryption. Traditionally, database security has always relied on server-side trust. This typically leaves the data accessible to administrators, even if they don’t have client access. If an attacker breaches the server, that’s almost automatically a catastrophic event.

With this new security model, Mongo is shifting access to the client and to the local drivers. It provides multiple encryption options; for developers to make use of this, they will use a new “encrypt” JSON scheme attribute.

This ensures that all application code can generally run unmodified, and even the admins won’t get access to the database or its logs and backups unless they get client access rights themselves. Because the logic resides in the drivers, the encryption is also handled totally separate from the actual database.

Other new features in MongoDB 4.2 include support for distributed transactions and the ability to manage MongoDB deployments from a single Kubernetes control plane.