I currently run my website on a single server with MongoDB. On my server I have two components (1) a crawler that runs hourly and appends data to my MongoDB instance (2) a web-site that reads from the crawler index and also writes to a user personalization DB. I am moving to Amazon EC2 for auto-scaling, so that web-server can auto-scale, so I can increase the number of servers as the web-traffic increases. I don't need auto-scaling for my crawler. This poses a challenge for how I use MongoDB. I'm wondering what my best option is to optimize on
- Minimal changes to my code (the code is in perl)
- Ability to seamlessly add/remove web-servers without worry about losing data in the DB
- Low cost
In the short-term, the DB will certainly be able to fit in memory across all machies since it will be under 2 GB. The user personalization DB can't be rebuilt so its more important to have this, while the index can easily be re-built. The current MongoDB crawl index has about 100k entries that are keyed on ~15 different columns. This is built for speed, as I am working on an online dating site (that is searchable in many ways).
I can think of a few options
- Use SimpleDB for the user personalization store, and MongoDB for the index. Have the index replicate across all machines, however, I don't know too much about MongoDB replication.
- Move everything to SimpleDB
- Move everything to DynamoDB
I don't know too much about SimpleDB and/or DynamoDB. Based on articles it seems like DynamoDB would bew a natural choice, but I'm not sure about good perl support, whether I can have all columns, index, etc. Anyone have experience or have any advice?
