Red Hat Satellite to drop MongoDB and will support only PostgreSQL backend

On 12th February, RedHat announced its plans to drop MongoDB from its Satellite system management solution. Satellite will now support only a single database - PostgreSQL. The move was made after the development team decided that a relational database with rollback and transactions was necessary for the features needed in Pulp and Satellite.

The team says that PostgreSQL is a better solution in terms of the types of data and usage that Satellite requires. They say that a single database backend will also help to simplify the overall architecture of Satellite along with supportability, backup, and disaster recovery. Users will not suffer any significant performance impact with the removal of MongoDB nor will any features of Satellite be impacted because of the same.

The embedded version of MongoDB will continue to be supported in the Satellite versions that it has already been released in. The Satellite team will create a patch for any issue that a user faces. Newer versions of MongoDB that are licensed under SSPL will not be used by Satellite.

According to Dev Class, the concept of the SSPL has not been received well by the open source community. The Server Side Public License was MongoDB’s helped cloud service providers take the community edition of the database and offer it as service to paying customers. But anyone doing so should share the source code underlying the service.

Following this news, Red Hat had also dropped MongoDB from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8. This is because according to Tom Callaway, University outreach Team lead, Red Hat, SSPL is “intentionally crafted to be aggressively discriminatory towards a specific class of users. To consider the SSPL to be “Free” or “Open Source” causes that shadow to be cast across all other licenses in the FOSS ecosystem, even though none of them carry that risk”.

The specific timeline of the change has not been released by the team, but this announcement was made simply to make users aware of the change that is coming. Uses can check the Satellite Blog to know more about this news.