In the blog post, Microsoft is brazen in its push to appeal to MongoDB dev’s who are concerned by the breaches. Indeed, the company titles the post “Dear #MongoDB users, we welcome you in #Azure #DocumentDB.” From the lead, the company makes it clear that security is a priority in DocumentDB. Customers can expect to be protected from code development to incident response. By working with Azure, developers automatically adhere to the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). This is Microsoft’s platform for creating software that is security compliant and affordable. Microsoft also discusses how the global distribution of Azure makes it ideal for developers. Its availability in 40 regions means customers can create and manage applications on a global level. With DocumentDB, dev’s get a multi-tenant database system that allows the development as planet scale applications. The service can index data for SQL, MongoDB, and JavaScript. Focusing on MongoDB and discussing how security is at the forefront of DocumentDB, Microsoft says security features are built into the platform: “DocumentDB provides support for a secret-based authorization model that utilizes a strong hash-based message authentication code (HMAC). In addition to the secret based authorization model, DocumentDB also supports policy driven IP-based access controls for inbound firewall support.” The aggressive play by Microsoft also includes the image below. It shows MongoDB as being poorly secured, while DocumentDB is protected fully.
Advantages of DocumentDB
Switching from Mongo is simple because DocumentDB does not require dev’s to rewrite their applications or discard current tools. The platform supports protocol for MongoDB. Microsoft also talks about some of the other benefits:
No Server Management – DocumentDB is a fully managed service, which means you do not have to manage any infrastructure or Virtual Machines yourself. And DocumentDB is available in all Azure Regions, so your data will be available globally instantly. Limitless Scale – You can scale throughput and storage independently and elastically. You can add capacity to serve millions of requests per second with ease. Enterprise grade – DocumentDB supports multiple local replicas to deliver 99.99% availability and data protection in the face of both local and regional failures. You automatically get enterprise grade compliance certifications and security features. MongoDB Compatibility – DocumentDB protocol support for MongoDB is designed for compability with MongoDB. You can use your existing code, applications, drivers, and tools to work with DocumentDB.
Microsoft is never shy about aggressively going after customers from a rival company. MongoDB customers may have been spooked by recent security problems, so Microsoft’s propaganda may give them food for thought.
