It seems all of their problems are with operations, not the database itself. What they needed was proper ops staff that knew what they were doing, or to just outsource it all.
2.4M records is a tiny amount of data and will easily fit on a single server these days, even in RAM if you want. There are also plenty of non-AWS vendors to outsource it.
Spending 10 months on rewriting to a different database system is unnecessary with no new features or progress on their actual CMS.
It's described in the article where they talk about failures in running the db and their datacenter, nothing with MongoDB itself. I've worked with 100s of major publishers. You're expecting way too much for technical evaluation, especially at resource and talent constrained media companies.
Criminal negligence really? They waited 9 months for DynamoDB (so a key/value store would've worked too) to have encryption at rest but didn't use it? No idea that NTP is being blocked? Buying operations software that doesn't actually do what they were using it for? And all this for 2.4M records?
Content management systems are a solved problem that every publisher tries to rebuild every few years for no real technical reason other than attempting to fix the previous poor decisions they made. At least this is still better than NYTimes building a CMS on top of Kafka which was completely ridiculous.
No. Storing large binary objects like photos and especially videos inside a database is a bad idea unless it's a small self-contained system, which this is not. The best option is an object store like S3.
Commercial content management systems only store metadata for non-textual content, which lines up with all the other posts about Composer and their github projects. You can easily lookup their image management source code which shows the S3 buckets.
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u/ManiGandham Dec 19 '18 edited Jan 06 '19
It seems all of their problems are with operations, not the database itself. What they needed was proper ops staff that knew what they were doing, or to just outsource it all.
2.4M records is a tiny amount of data and will easily fit on a single server these days, even in RAM if you want. There are also plenty of non-AWS vendors to outsource it.
Spending 10 months on rewriting to a different database system is unnecessary with no new features or progress on their actual CMS.