Faster Migrations to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud with migVisor by EPAM

As the needs of Google Cloud customers evolve and shift towards new user expectations, more and more customers are choosing the MongoDB Application Data Platform as an ideal alternative to legacy databases. Together, we’ve partnered with users looking to digitize and grow their businesses (such as Forbes), or meet increased demand due to COVID (such as our work with Boxed, the online grocer) by scaling up infrastructure and data processing within a condensed time frame. As a fully-managed service within the Google Cloud Marketplace, MongoDB Atlas enables our joint customers to quickly deploy applications on Google Cloud with a unified user experience and an integrated billing model. Migrations to managed cloud database services vary in complexity, but even under the most straightforward circumstances, careful evaluation and planning is required. Customer database environments often leverage database technologies from multiple vendors, across different versions, and can run into thousands of deployments. This makes manual assessment cumbersome and error prone.

This is where EPAM Systems, a provider with strategic specialization in database and application modernization solutions, comes in. EPAM’s database migration assessment tool, migVisor, is a first-of-its-kind cloud database migration assessment product that helps companies analyze database workloads, configuration, and structure to generate a visual cloud migration roadmap that identifies potential quick wins as well as challenge areas. migVisor identifies the best migration path for databases using sophisticated scoring logic to rank the complexity of migrating them to a cloud-centric technology stack.

Previously applicable only to migrations from RDBMS to cloud-based RDBMS, migVisor is now available for MongoDB to MongoDB Atlas migrations.

migVisor helps you:

• Analyze migration decisions objectively by providing a secure assessment of source and target databases that’s independent of deployed environments

• Accelerate time to migration by automating the discovery and assessment process, which reduces development cycles from a few weeks to a few days

• Easily understand tech insights by providing a visual overview of your entire journey, enabling better planning and improving stakeholder visibility

• Reduce database licensing costs by giving you intelligent insights on the target environment and recommended migration paths

Key features of migVisor for MongoDB

For several years, migVisor by EPAM has delivered automated assessments that have helped hundreds of customers migrate their relational databases to cloud-based or cloud-native databases. Now, migVisor adds support for the world’s leading modern data platform: MongoDB. As part of the initial release, migVisor will support self-managed MongoDB to MongoDB Atlas migration assessments. We plan to support TCO for MongoDB migrations, application modernization, migration assessment, and relational MongoDB migration assessments in future releases.

MongoDB is also a natural fit for Google Cloud’s Open Cloud strategy of providing customers a broad set of fully managed database services, as Google Cloud's own GM and VP of Engineering & Databases, Andi Gutmans, notes:

How the migVisor assessment works

migVisor analyzes source databases (on-prem or in any cloud environment) for migration assessment to a new target. The assessment includes the following steps:

1. The simple-to-use migVisor Metadata Collector (mMC) collects metadata from the source database, including: featureCompatibilityVersion value, journaling status for data bearing nodes, MongoDB storage size used, replica set configuration, and more.

2. On the migVisor Analysis Dashboard you can select the source/target pair (e.g., MongoDB to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud).

3. In the migVisor console, you can then view the automated assessment output that was created from migVisor’s migration complexity scoring engine, including classification of the migration into high/medium/low complexity and identification of potential migration challenges and incompatibilities.

4. Finally, you can also export the assessment output in CSV format for further analysis in your preferred data analysis/reporting tool.

Conclusion

Together, Google Cloud and MongoDB have successfully worked with many organizations to streamline cloud migrations and modernize their legacy landscape. To build on the foundation of providing our customers with the best-in-class experience, we’ve closely worked with Google Cloud and EPAM Systems to integrate MongoDB Atlas with migVisor. Because of this, customers will now be able to better plan migrations, reduce risk and avoid missteps, identify quick wins for TCO reduction, review migration complexities, and appropriately plan migration phases for the best outcomes.