Red Hat drops MongoDB out of Satellite

Red Hat is prising MongoDB out of its Satellite infrastructure management platform in favour of PostgreSQL.

The open source vendor made the announcement in a blog post yesterday saying it would “standardize on a PostgreSQL backend” and that it wanted to ensure users “were not caught by surprise as this is a change to the underlying databases of Satellite”.

“No specific timing or release is being communicated at this time. At this point we’re simply hoping to raise awareness of the change that is coming to help users of Satellite prepare for the removal of MongoDB,” it added.

The post said that the firm felt that “PostgreSQL is a better solution for the types of data and usage that Satellite requires. Also, unifying on a single database backend simplifies the overall architecture of Satellite and can make supportability, backup, and disaster recovery easier.”

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The embedded version of MongoDB will continue to be supported in versions of Satellite featuring it, and the Satellite team will take care of patching, “until it is phased out”.

However, the post continued, “Satellite will not use newer versions of MongoDB that are licensed under SSPL.”

The Server Side Public License wasMongoDB’sanswer to the problem of cloud service providers taking the community edition of the database and offering it as service to paying customers. The SSPL demands that anyone doing so should share the source code underlying the service.

While MongoDB’s irritation may be understandable, the concept of the SSPL has gone down like a lead balloon with much of the open source community. TheRed Hat-backedFedora project has added the SSPL to its bad license list, and MongoDB will not be supported in RHEL 8.0.