Database
Amazon DocumentDB
Amazon DocumentDB is a managed JSON document database with MongoDB API compatibility for workloads that value flexible documents, managed availability, and AWS-native operations.
Explore pricing models, common use cases, infrastructure support, and the AWS services that commonly work with Amazon DocumentDB.
Amazon DocumentDB pricing and cost programs
Pricing model: Managed document database usage
- On-Demand
- Available
- Reserved Instances or reserved capacity
- Available
- Savings Plans
- Service-specific
- Spot
- Not applicable
Billing dimensions: Instance or serverless capacity · Storage · I/O · Backup and transfer
Programs and modes: On-Demand Instances · Reserved Instances · Elastic Clusters · I/O-Optimized
Reserved terms apply to eligible instance-based configurations; elastic and I/O-Optimized modes differ.
Free Tier: Service-specific — verify current offers
Pricing reviewed 2026-07-25. Reviewed against the linked official AWS pricing page. Recheck regional rates and program terms before purchase.
Official AWS sources reviewed 2026-07-21.
Why implement Amazon DocumentDB?
- Separates compute instances from durable distributed cluster storage and automates backups, patching, recovery, and replica management.
- Provides a MongoDB-compatible API for document workloads without operating replica sets, storage nodes, or backup servers.
- Integrates with VPC networking, IAM administration, KMS encryption, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch, and AWS Backup.
How to implement Amazon DocumentDB
- Run the compatibility assessment against the exact application drivers, commands, operators, indexes, and operational behavior because DocumentDB is API-compatible rather than identical to MongoDB.
- Create a subnet group, security groups, parameter groups, encrypted cluster, and instances in private subnets across Availability Zones; store credentials outside application code.
- Create required indexes before bulk migration, connect through the cluster endpoint with TLS and replica-set settings, then validate query plans, results, failover, backups, and restore.
Amazon DocumentDB best practices
- Use at least three instances across three Availability Zones for production high availability and direct reads through the reader endpoint only when the consistency tradeoff is acceptable.
- Create intentional indexes, inspect slow-query and profiler output, batch operations appropriately, and test working-set memory plus storage I/O under realistic load.
- Use TLS, least-privilege security groups and secrets, automatic backups, deletion protection, alarms, current drivers, and retry logic that reconnects after failover.
Amazon DocumentDB use cases and server impact
- Content catalogs and user profiles
- JSON application data with evolving attributes
- Managed modernization of compatible MongoDB workloads
Replaces self-managed document-database nodes, replication, patching, and backup infrastructure, while application compatibility and query or index design still need validation.
Official implementation resources
Commonly paired AWS services
- Amazon Elastic Container Service — Container orchestration
- AWS Lambda — Run code without servers
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud — Isolated virtual network
- AWS Key Management Service — Key management
- AWS Secrets Manager — Store secrets & keys
- Amazon CloudWatch — Metrics & logs
- AWS Backup — Centralized backup management
- AWS Database Migration Service — Database migration and replication