DocumentDB joins the Linux Foundation

We released DocumentDB—our fully permissive, PostgreSQL backed, open-source document database project earlier this year. In just a few short months, the project has gained escalating engagement from the developer community—many of whom expressed enthusiasm to both use and contribute to the solution. The project grew to nearly 2,000 GitHub stars, with issues, discussions, and feature requests flooding in—initially from Postgres enthusiasts. What started as a pair of Postgres extensions, quickly evolved into a fully featured, developer-friendly document database. It is based on Postgres, taking advantage of the proven, modern engine and the broad Postgres ecosystem. It extends Postgres with stronger JSON/BSON support and document-style queries. DocumentDB is compatible with the popular open source MongoDB drivers and tools, making it easier to use for new and existing apps. It offers seamless Kubernetes-based deployment anywhere and is designed with high availability and performance in mind for mission critical applications. It takes less than a minute to get it up and running, and even less to start contributing. Today, we are excited to announce yet another milestone in DocumentDB’s journey: the project is officially joining the Linux Foundation.

Why join the Linux Foundation?

The project’s mission statement and overarching principles remain the same—building a truly open source, vendor-neutral, developer first document database on top of Postgres. Contributing to Linux Foundation continues Microsoft’s commitment to open source as one of the top contributors to the Foundation. Joining the foundation is the next step in that commitment, as well as eventually creating an open standard for NoSQL databases. While the value proposition of document datastores over relational databases is clear, establishing a standard like the ANSI SQL standard for relational databases would be invaluable. Joining the Linux Foundation will create an independent identity for DocumentDB and provide a conduit for any database provider to contribute to our mission. In addition, Postgres continues to be hailed as the overwhelming favorite platform of choice and will continue to serve as the project’s backbone. For DocumentDB, open-source Postgres will be favored over a forked version of Postgres. The Linux Foundation will ensure these governing principles are adhered to by DocumentDB to maintain consistency.

Developer first

From its inception, DocumentDB has been built with developer freedom in mind. Under the MIT license, users have the utmost freedom to use the project as they please. Developers can interact with DocumentDB via PostgreSQL and benefit from stronger JSON support and document queries it provides. Developers can also leverage their existing MongoDB expertise to interact with DocumentDB using MongoDB drivers and tools. We are committed to relying on PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL extensibility. Similarly, we are committed to 100% compatibility with MongoDB drivers to ensure the document database ecosystem thrives. Joining the Linux Foundation will only further our developer-first mindset by ensuring these principles are followed.

Growing community, growing structure

One of our most exciting developments has been the number of organizations who expressed interest in both adopting the extension, as well as contributing to the project’s code base. Some had already built a significant presence in the open-source Postgres community and were looking to expand the scope of their projects. Others were seasoned vets in providing managed database services and curious to incorporate DocumentDB into their products. With the project’s origin rooted in the Microsoft organization on GitHub, a central and neutral home was needed for more open collaboration. In addition, with a growing list of enthusiastic contributors, we needed more structure. A Technical Steering Committee (TSC) was formed to guide executive decisions on the vision and roadmap, along with being the face of the project. A coterie of maintainers was created to gatekeep check-ins and uphold the project’s standards. Contributing to the foundation accelerated these improvements.

AWS is excited to contribute to the open source DocumentDB project, now stewarded by the Linux Foundation. DocumentDB, a permissively licensed database for implementing the MongoDB API, and an extension to PostgreSQL, the world’s leading open source database, advances a future where developers can rest assured that their applications are portable and compatible.

—Adam Abrevaya, Director, Amazon DocumentDB.

Document databases play an important role in customers’ database estates and ensuring customers have sufficient choice in this area is important. It is great to see the DocumentDB project joining the Linux Foundation which assures customers and the community have an openly-governed, open-source option available to them.

—Sailesh Krishnamurthy, Vice President, Engineering, Google Cloud.

By contributing DocumentDB to the Linux Foundation, Microsoft is ensuring the community’s ownership of the project. This move underscores our shared commitment to advancing open-source innovation and empowering developers with powerful, flexible tools built on PostgreSQL. Collaborating with Microsoft on the DocumentDB extension for Yugabyte has been an exciting project, and we look forward to joining the technical steering committee and continuing to contribute to the roadmap of distributed document databases together.

—Karthik Ranganathan, Co-Founder and CEO, Yugabyte.

What’s next?

As DocumentDB enters its next chapter with the Linux Foundation, we’re carving out a path where document databases are open, interoperable, and standardized—built with the flexibility of NoSQL and the reliability of Postgres. This move isn’t just symbolic; it reflects a concrete shift in how we build and govern the project moving forward. We’ve launched a new GitHub organization, documentdb, which will serve as the project’s new home. All development, issues, and discussions are now happening in the repo under the new org: https://github.com/documentdb/documentdb.

Be sure to update your bookmarks and forks accordingly. Whether you are looking for a NoSQL database solution, eager to contribute, or simply want to check us out—star our GitHub repo to stay updated, and join our community on Discord to ask questions and communicate directly with our Technical Steering Committee.

Let’s continue building together.

Kirill Gavrylyuk

Vice President of Azure Cosmos DB

Kirill Gavrylyuk is a Vice President for Azure Cosmos DB and related NoSQL services at Microsoft. Kirill worked on many aspects of Cosmos DB service since 2016. Prior to that, Kirill worked on various distributed systems and services at Microsoft, including founding Azure Mobile Services and Azure Functions.

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