MongoHQ in Open Relationship With MongoDB, Changes Name to Compose

MongoHQ is expanding beyond its MongoDB roots and changing its name in tow. Under the new name “Compose,” the company now offers ElasticSearch as a service through its formerly MongoDB-exclusive platform. The ElasticSearch service is now in beta.

The company is evolving into a multi-Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) vendor. Their mission is to enable developers to choose the database that is right for their need, helping get them to production quickly. "As-a-service” means that it not only helps deploy, but also helps host and scale databases for customers.

The company that provides the database of its former namesake, MongoDB, raised $150 million last October. It was one of the largest single funding rounds for a database company at the time. In total, MongoDB has raised more than $231 million.

The first supported database expansion to ElasticSearch services means customers can combine speed and scale of MongoDB application data with the real-time search capabilities of ElasticSearch through a single platform.

ElasticSearch has seen growing adoption for both search and analytics for enterprises and web-scale operations. The open-source structured search engine has a wide range of uses, including user-defined, flexible queries across a range of attributes and powerful full-text search. It includes the ELK stack: ElasticSearch for Search, Logstash for centralized log data and Kibana for real-time analysis of streaming data.

The company will continue to add databases to its roster of as-a-service options, evolving into a hosted database specialist rather than a hosted MongoDB specialist. However, as it increases its available options, it should increase adoption of MongoDB as well.

Applications are increasingly being powered by more than one database as developers leverage individual strengths of each offering. The company’s expansion will help developers build new applications powered by multiple databases in one-click production deployments. Users pay based on the amount of data that they actually use.

The service helps to scale automatically, growing as your data grows. It provides automatic daily backups as well as a way to quickly integrate new versions of MongoDB and ElasticSearch. Customers can choose where they host their data.

Compose CEO Kurt Mackey explained the name: “In computer science, ‘composition’ is the process of combining existing functions into a new function that solves new problems. It is a simple and well-understood programming concept that can also be applied to database infrastructure. Modern applications have diverse data problems that are poorly served with a single database technology. Compose helps developers combine multiple open-source tools to solve unique data problems in production applications.”