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The Guardian migrated their CMS’s datastore in 2018 from a self-managed MongoDB cluster to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS for a fully managed solution. The team did an API-based migration without any downtime. Guardian’s in-house CMS – called Composer – which stores articles, blog content, photo galleries and video was originally built on top of MongoDB as a datastore. This was preceded by a vendor software backed by an Oracle database. This setup had downtimes whenever the schema had to be migrated. As an alternative, the team looked at various NoSQL dbs, and one of the key reasons for choosing MongoDB seems to have been flexibility.

In April the Guardian switched off the Mongo DB cluster used to store our content after completing a migration to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS. This post covers why and how At the Guardian, the majority of content – including articles, live blogs, galleries and video content – is produced in our in-house CMS tool, Composer. This, until recently, was backed by a Mongo DB database running on AWS.