MongoDB hosted at Compose - great for beginners but needs a clearer transition to more advanced users
February 21, 2018
MongoDB hosted at Compose - great for beginners but needs a clearer transition to more advanced users
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Compose
It hosts the primary database for our API - MongoDB. I have to manage IT for the whole project, so I'm the only one who knows about/uses it. It's useful as a low maintenance database solution with good performance and decent tooling. Since I'm the only IT profile in the company, I have to be very efficient with my time, and Compose let's me offload DB admin to more qualified people.
- Low/zero maintenance DB hosting. For smaller businesses, IT salaries represent a big investment - tools like Compose allow me to concentrate on product development, where I bring the most value.
- Security and confidence - in my 2 years with Compose I've never had any problems to speak of. The few times I needed help the Compose team was quite reactive.
- Experience - they've been hosting Mongo and Redis for a long time. I did quite a lot of research in 2015 when I started with them - they seemed to be the most stable and experienced offering out there.
- Updates - at the moment I'm seriously considering going to Atlas. Mongo 3.6 is a huge update and at the moment Compose is stuck on 3.4, while Atlas is up to 3.6.
- Analytics - the analytics/performance tools for Compose are not very user-friendly. For a hosted, let's say novice-friendly offering like Compose, I think there should be far more context about how to interpret the information given and easier ways to alert in case of problems.
- At the beginning, VERY positive. I didn't know Mongo very well when I started this project, and I needed to get a POC up very quickly. Compose let me basically ignore all database management.
- Compose basically kept up its end of the deal... until a few months ago when we started pushing the envelope. Latency problems and, despite digging deep into documentation, etc, unable to really understand if/how much our Compose instance was to blame. In the end it wasn't, but trial and error was about all I was able to do with Compose.
- Globally, Compose had a very good ROI, since it allowed me to offload DB admin at a moment when having to do it would have seriously slowed our progress.