AWS has announced a new document database service to support MongoDB workloads. Amazon DocumentDB can be used to “store, retrieve, and manage semi-structured data.”

With the new database, developers will still be able to use the same MongoDB code, drivers, and tools, but will also enjoy improved performance, scalability, and availability, all while not worrying about the underlying infrastructure, AWS explained. The solution is built on an SSD-based storage layer and has 6x replications across three Availability Zones.

Amazon DocumentDB will automatically backup data to Amazon S3 and provide point-in-time recovery from up to 35 days back with no downtime or performance decreases, the company explained

According to AWS, customers can use AWS Database Migration Service to migrate on-prem or Amazon EC2 MongoDB databases to the new service.

“While other companies have taken the same emulation approach we have to providing a MongoDB compatible service, nobody has built the unique, distributed, fault-tolerant, highly scalable, self-healing storage system that AWS has to work seamlessly with MongoDB,” said Shawn Bice, vice president of non-relational databases at AWS. “To meet developers’ needs, we looked at multiple different approaches to supporting MongoDB workloads and concluded that the best way to improve the customer experience was to build a new purpose-built document database from the ground up, while supporting the same MongoDB APIs that our customers currently use and like. This effort took more than two years of development, and we’re excited to make this available to our customers today.”

It will be interesting to see how MongoDB reacts to Amazon’s news. The company recently introduced the Server Side Public License to protect its open-source code from being taken advantage of by cloud providers.