Accelerating Delivery with a New Quarterly Release Cycle, Starting with MongoDB 5.0

Mat Keep and Dan Pasette
October 28, 2020 | Updated: July 7, 2021
#mongodb

MongoDB 4.4 reached General Availability in July 2020. It was a big release. Our R&D team invested close to 270,000 engineering hours and closed over 5,200 tickets to bring 4.4 to production readiness. Like previous versions, it combined multiple projects that our engineering team had developed over the prior 12 months, delivering them all together in one large annual MongoDB release.

Going forward, we will no longer be holding back all of our new features and enhancements for a single release once per year. Starting in 2021, we will move to a more frequent delivery model with new Rapid Releases pushed live once per quarter (and even faster in the future!).

Why we are changing our release cycle & versioning

Our new release cadence will enable us to get the latest innovations and features offered by the database and drivers into your hands faster.

In order for the MongoDB community and our customers to understand this new release cadence and make it easy to track upgrade/downgrade dependencies between versions, the next major GA release of the database will be named MongoDB 5.0.

Our engineering team is already heads down developing 5.0, with its release planned for 2021. Beyond the move to Rapid Releases, we also have some major functionality enhancements coming for MongoDB 5.0. Stay tuned!

How the new versioning will work

Like today, we will still have an annual release that includes all features from the 3 prior quarterly Rapid Releases. This will be our Major Release, with the same product lifecycle documented in our current MongoDB Server Support Policy.

MongoDB 5.0 will be the first Major Release under our new versioning scheme. We will then increment the major version number by 1 for every Major Release. Rapid and Major Releases will use the new versioning scheme and semantics as follows:

  • 5.0 → Annual Major Release, scheduled for 2021
  • 5.1.0 → First Rapid Release one quarter later
  • 5.1.1 → Patch release on first Rapid Release
  • 5.2.0-rc0 → Initial release candidate for the second Rapid Release
  • 5.3 → will follow the conventions above
  • 6.0 → Annual Major Release, scheduled for 2022

Consistent with our support policy today, patch releases will be published for each Major Release during its product lifecycle. Each Major Release will be inclusive of all of the code and features of the three previous Rapid Releases, as well as three months of additional development work in readying the new Major Release. For example, MongoDB 6.0.0 will include all of the code and features of MongoDB 5.1.0 through 5.3.x.

The figure below shows how the versioning will work.

New MongoDB Versioning Structure

Which versions will we support?

All Major and Rapid Releases will be available and supported in MongoDB Atlas, our fully managed, multi-cloud database service.

Outside of Atlas, for our on-premise database software, Major Releases will remain supported, but Rapid Releases will be available as development builds from the MongoDB Download Center. These will be for evaluation only — they will not be supported releases outside of Atlas. For example, we will not offer support for the MongoDB Enterprise Server releases versioned MongoDB 5.1.0, MongoDB 5.2.0, and MongoDB 5.3.0 (and all patch releases for each of these versions). Commercial support, along with integration to Ops Manager and Cloud Manager, will be available for them in the annual Major Release that follows.

Maintaining the annual release cadence with Major Releases will ensure there is no impact to those of you who don't wish to (or who aren’t able to) upgrade often.

Why are Rapid Releases only supported in MongoDB Atlas?

Focusing the qualification and support of new Rapid Releases to MongoDB Atlas enables our engineering organization to ship even higher quality software faster to the cloud. Otherwise we would have to qualify each release on the 20+ different supported MongoDB platforms every quarter, which would significantly reduce the rate of feature delivery to you. It would also mean users incurring the operational overhead of upgrading each quarter to stay on the current release, which is something we can simply automate for them in MongoDB Atlas.

MongoDB Atlas customers in the dedicated tiers (M10+) will have the option to opt in and out of quarterly release trains, while all other MongoDB users will be able to download each quarterly release for evaluation.

Release Candidates on the path to MongoDB 5.0

We plan to publish our first Release Candidate in the first half of 2021. It will be available from the Download Center, and will be tagged as MongoDB 5.0.0-rc0 (Release Candidate).

Consuming more frequent releases: Versioned API

Upgrading to any new version of a database can be a long and complex process. This is because you typically have application-side dependencies that mean you also have to upgrade your drivers and sometimes parts of your code as well.

With the new MongoDB Versioned API, that all changes. You will be able to upgrade to the latest releases of the MongoDB database without first having to upgrade your applications and drivers.

With the Versioned API, you can pin your application to a specific version of the MongoDB API with the confidence that your code will continue to run for years, without interruption, even as the database is upgraded beneath it. This provides you with a level of investment protection and API stability that you don’t get from most other databases.

Wrapping Up

Starting with MongoDB 5.0, our switch to Rapid Releases is well aligned to a cloud-first world characterized by frequent updates. You will spend less time waiting for big features tied to a major annual release. With the Versioned API, you won't have to think about version compatibility and planning upgrade cycles across your applications, drivers, and the database.

If you have any questions, please use the comment section below. Alternatively, you can post a comment in our Community Forum or speak directly to your MongoDB representative.

Safe Harbor The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion. This information is merely intended to outline our general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision nor is this a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality.

Try MongoDB Atlas for free today!

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Accelerating Mainframe Offload to MongoDB with TCS MasterCraft™

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a leading multinational information technology services and consulting company, leverages its IP-based solutions to accelerate and optimize service delivery. TCS MasterCraft™ TransformPlus uses intelligent automation to modernize and migrate enterprise-level mainframe applications to new, leading-edge architectures and databases like MongoDB. In this blog, we’ll review the reasons why organizations choose to modernize and how TCS has made the process easy and relatively risk-free. Background Legacy Modernization Legacy modernization is a strategic initiative that enables you to refresh your existing database and applications portfolio by applying the latest innovations in development methodologies, architectural patterns, and technologies. At the current churn rate, about half of today’s S&P 500 firms will be replaced over the next 10 years $100T of economic value is ready to be unlocked over the next decade via digital transformation Source Legacy System Challenges Legacy technology platforms of the past, particularly monolithic mainframe systems, have always been challenged by the pace of disruptive digitalization. Neither the storage nor the accessibility of these rigid systems is agile enough to meet the increasing demands of volume, speed, and data diversity generated by modern digital applications. The result is noise between the legacy system of record and digital systems of engagement. This noise puts companies at a competitive disadvantage. It often manifests as a gap between customer service and user experience, impeding the delivery of new features and offerings and constraining the business from responding nimbly to changing trends. Operational costs of mainframe and other legacy systems have also skyrocketed. With each million instructions per second (MIPS) costing up to $4,000 per year, these older systems can create the equivalent of nearly 40% of an organization’s IT budget in technical debt, significantly increasing the overall annual run cost. And as qualified staff age and retire over the years, it’s becoming harder to find and hire people with the required mainframe skills. To manage MIPS consumption, a large number of our customers are offloading commonly accessed mainframe data to an independent operational data layer (ODL), to which queries are redirected from consuming applications. IT experts understand both the risk and the critical need to explore modernization options like encapsulation, rehosting, replatforming, refactoring, re-architecting, or rebuilding to replace these legacy systems. The key considerations when choosing an approach are familiar: risk of business disruption, cost, timelines, productivity, and the availability of the necessary skills. MongoDB + TCS MasterCraft™ TransformPlus = Transformation Catalyst To stay competitive, businesses need their engineering and IT teams to do these three things, among others: Build innovative digital apps fast Use data as a competitive moat to protect and grow their business Lower cost and risk while improving customer experience Some customers use a “lift and shift” approach to move workloads off the mainframe to cloud for immediate savings, but that process can’t unlock the value that comes with microservice architectures and document databases. Others gain that value by re-architecting and rewriting their applications, but this approach can be time consuming, expensive, and risky. More and more, customers are using a tools-driven refactoring approach to intelligently automate code conversion. What TCS MasterCraft™ TransformPlus Brings to the Table TCS MasterCraft™TransformPlus automates the migration of legacy applications and databases to modern architectures like MongoDB. It extracts business logics from decades-old legacy mainframe systems as a convertible, NoSQL document data model for deployment. This makes extraction faster, easier, and more economical, and reduces the risk that comes with rewriting legacy applications. With more than 25 years of experience, TCS’s track record includes: 60+ modernization projects successfully delivered 500M+ lines of COBOL code analyzed 25M+ lines of COBOL code converted to Java 50M+ new lines of Java code auto-generated What MongoDB Brings to the Table MongoDB’s document data model platform can help make development cycles up to 5 times faster. Businesses can drive innovation faster, cut costs by 70% or more, and reduce their risk at the same time. As a developer, MongoDB gives you: The best way to work with data The ability to put data where you need it The freedom to run anywhere Why is TCS collaborating with MongoDB for Mainframe Offload? Cost. Redirecting queries away from the mainframe to the ODL significantly reduces costs. Even cutting just 20%-30% in MIPS consumption can save millions of dollars in mainframe operating costs. Agility. As an ODL built on a modern data platform, MongoDB helps developers build new apps and digital experiences 3—5 times faster than is possible on a mainframe. User Experience. MongoDB meets demands for exploding data volumes and user populations by scaling out on commodity hardware, with self-healing replicas that maintain 24x7 service. More details can be found here . How TCS MasterCraftTM Accelerates Mainframe Offload to MongoDB Data Migration Configures target document schema to corresponding relational schema Automatically transforms relational data from mainframe sources to MongoDB documents Loads data to MongoDB Atlas with the latest connector support Application Migration Facilitates a cognitive code analysis-based application knowledge repository Ensures complete, comprehensive application knowledge extraction Automates conversion of application logic from COBOL to Java, with data access layer accessing data from MongoDB Splits monolithic code into multiple microservices Automates migration of mainframe screens to AngularJS-based UI Together, TCS MasterCraft™ TransformPlus and MongoDB can simplify and accelerate your journey to the cloud, streamlining and protecting your data while laying the foundation for digital success. Download the Modernization Guide to learn more.

October 28, 2020
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Data and the European Landscape: 3 Trends for 2022

The past two years have brought massive changes for IT leaders: large and complex cloud migrations; unprecedented numbers of people suddenly working, shopping and learning from home; and a burst in demand for digital-first experiences. Like everyone else, we are hoping that 2022 isn’t so disruptive (fingers crossed!), our customer conversations in Europe do lead us to believe the new year will bring new business priorities. We’re already noticing changes in conversations around vendor lock-in, thanks to the Digital Markets Act, a new enthusiasm for combining operational and analytical data to drive new insights faster, and a more strategic embrace of sustainability. Here’s how we see these trends playing out in 2022. Digital markets act draws new attention to cloud vendor lock-in in Europe We’ve heard plenty about the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act , which, in the name of ensuring fair and open digital markets, would place new restrictions on companies that are deemed to be digital “gatekeepers” in the region. That discussion will be nothing compared to the vigorous debate we expect once the EU begins the very tricky political business of determining exactly which companies will fall under the act. If the EU sets the bar for revenues, users, and market size high enough, it’s possible that the regulation will end up affecting only Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. But a European group representing 2,500 CIOs and almost 700 organizations is now pushing to have the regulation encompass more software companies. Their main concern centers around “distorted competition” in cloud infrastructure services and a worry that companies are being locked into one cloud vendor. A trend that will likely increase in 2022 that pushes back on cloud vendor lock-in is embracing multi-cloud strategies. We should expect to see more organisations in the region pursuing multi-cloud environments as a means to improve business continuity and agility whilst being able to access best of breed services from each cloud provider. As we have always said …”it’s fine to date your cloud provider….but don’t ever marry them.” The convergence of operational and analytical data The processing of operational and analytical data is almost always contained in different data systems, each tuned to that use case and managed by separate teams. But because that data lives in separate places, it’s almost impossible for organisations to generate insights and automate actions in real time, against live data. We believe 2022 is the year we’ll see a critical mass of companies in the region make significant progress toward a convergence of their operational and analytical data. We’re already starting to see some of the principles of microservices in operational applications, such as domain ownership, be applied to analytics as well. We’re hearing about this from so many of our customers locally, who are looking at MongoDB as an application data platform that allows them to perform queries across both real-time and historical data, using a unified platform and a single query API. This results in the applications they are building becoming more intelligent and contextual to their users, while avoiding dependencies on centralized analytics teams that otherwise slow down how quickly new, data-driven experiences can be released. Sustainability drives local strategic IT choice Technology always has some environmental cost. Sometimes that’s obvious — such as the energy needs and emissions associated with Bitcoin mining. More often, though, the environmental costs are well hidden. The European Green Deal commits the European Union to reducing emissions by 55% by 2030, with a focus on sustainable industry. With the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26) recently completed in Glasgow, and coming off the hottest European summer on record, climate issues have become top of mind. That means our customers are increasingly looking to make their technical operations more sustainable — including in their choice of cloud provider and data centers. According to research from IDC , more than 20% of CxOs say that sustainability is now important in selecting a strategic cloud service provider, and some 29% of CxOs are including sustainability into their RFPs for cloud services. Most interesting, 26% say they are willing to switch to providers with better sustainability credentials. Historically, it’s been difficult to make a switch like that. That’s part of the reason we built MongoDB Atlas — to give our customers the flexibility to run in any region , with any of the three largest cloud providers, and to make it easy to switch between them, and even to run a single database cluster across them. Publicly available information about the footprint of individual regions and even single data centers will make it simpler for companies to make informed decisions. Already, at least one cloud platform has added indicators to regions with the lowest carbon footprint. Source: IDC, European Customers Engage Services Providers at All Stages of Their Cloud Journey, IDC Survey Spotlight, Doc #EUR248484021, Dec 2021

December 21, 2021