At Percona, we’ve always believed that the best software isn’t built in a vacuum—it’s built in the open, fueled by the real-world challenges of the people who use it every day. Today, I’m excited to walk you through a journey that perfectly illustrates this: the road from a JIRA ticket to native Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service (OSS) support in Percona Backup for MongoDB (PBM).
While this feature announcement might not be a surprise, having been mentioned in the Percona Backup for MongoDB 1.12.0 Release Notes, this is more than just a technical update – it’s the great story behind it. It’s a partnership between an engaged community member and the Percona engineering team.
The Spark: A Challenge and a Commitment
This, like many stories you’ve heard, started with a Jira ticket. A user in the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem hit a wall: PBM’s standard S3 implementation was incompatible with Alibaba’s Object Storage Service (OSS) due to specific encoding requirements (aws-chunked). But this story took a turn from “feature request” to “active collaboration” almost immediately. The user didn’t just report the issue; they reached out and told us, “I want to build this. Can you help me get started?”
Eleven Days to Code
The speed of open source collaboration can be breathtaking when the right people come together. Just 11 days after that initial conversation, a GitHub Pull Request was live.
The contributor didn’t just throw code over the fence. They took a rigorous approach:
- Validation: They utilized PBM’s built-in storage test utility to verify the implementation.
- End-to-End Testing: They confirmed that not only were backups and lists working, but that restoration—the most critical part of any backup tool—was seamless on Percona Server for MongoDB.
The following week, our engineers jumped into the GitHub thread. Internally, we recognized the value of this contribution immediately. We aligned on a priority path to get this into the very next release window, ensuring the contributor’s hard work reached the community as quickly as possible.
Contributor Spotlight: A Conversation with the Author
To gain a deeper understanding of this journey, I sat down (virtually) with Imre Nagi – the contributor behind the PR, to discuss his experience.
What was the specific challenge in your Alibaba Cloud environment that made you decide to move from filing a request to personally writing the code?
We recently transitioned from GCP/AWS to Alibaba Cloud. While PBM supports an S3-compatible interface to interact with Alicloud OSS, our security restriction, which dictates the use of an Alicloud RAM Role, has become the main blocker to using the PBM S3 implementation. It was simply because the Alicloud RAM role doesn’t work with that S3 interface. That’s why I decided to implement an Alibaba Cloud OSS implementation in PBM with Assume RAM role support.
You had a working PR ready in just 11 days. What was your experience like collaborating with the Percona engineering team during that rapid turnaround?
It was fun. I received some feedback about the PR, and most importantly, I was given a clear timeline/ETA for when this feature could be merged into the upstream. Knowing this really helped me make an internal decision on what we could do while waiting for the feature to be merged. I really appreciate it.
You used the PBM storage test utility and performed restoration tests. How did those tools help you feel confident in your contribution?
Before the implementation was merged into upstream, we had been running it in production for some time, and it worked for us. I suppose that was a valuable contribution to the open-source community.
Why was it important to you that this feature be part of an entirely open source tool like PBM?
We are using PBM for our MongoDB backup. Contribution to the community is the least we can do. Hopefully, it can benefit the open source community.
Thank you again, Imre! Big Kudos!
Beyond the Code: A Full Partnership
True Open Source isn’t just about merging a Pull Request; it’s about stewardship. While the contributor was busy even updating our documentation via a second PR to ensure users knew how to use the new feature, Percona’s team went to work behind the scenes.
To ensure this was “Percona-grade,” we didn’t just supervise the code; we reinforced it:
- CI Integration: We integrated the Alibaba Cloud SDK into our Continuous Integration pipelines.
- Rigorous Testing: Our QA teams performed exhaustive performance and end-to-end (E2E) testing.
- Refinement: We worked closely with the contributor to polish the Go implementation to meet the highest standards of the PBM architecture.
The result is a solution that the community and our enterprise customers can rely on with 100% confidence.
Why Choose Percona Over ApsaraDB for MongoDB?
This blog post is also a moment to reaffirm what makes Percona different. Many users in the Alibaba ecosystem initially look at ApsaraDB for MongoDB, the platform’s managed service. However, we increasingly see power users and enterprises moving their workloads to Percona Server for MongoDB (running on ECS or hybrid clouds) and using PBM for several reasons:
- ApsaraDB is a proprietary DBaaS. Once your data and backup logic are tied to their specific APIs and ecosystem, moving out becomes a massive undertaking. Percona gives you “Cloud-native” performance with “Cloud-agnostic” freedom.
- ApsaraDB’s pricing can be complex, especially with “hidden” costs for snapshots and storage. With PBM and OSS, you pay only for the raw storage you use, with no additional “enterprise” tax.
- ApsaraDB often gates advanced features (like certain Point-in-Time Recovery or audit logging options) behind higher tiers. Percona offers enterprise-grade features, including PITR, physical backups, and advanced security—all 100% open source.
- Hybrid Flexibility: PBM allows you to back up an on-premises cluster to Alibaba OSS, or vice versa. ApsaraDB is largely restricted to its own environment.
Percona Backup for MongoDB is—and will remain—100% open source. Whether you are running a single node or a massive global cluster, the native Alibaba Cloud integration is available to you for free. We believe that robust, secure backups are a fundamental right for the database community, not a premium add-on.
Why This Matters
This journey proves that Percona is a platform for your contributions. When you see a gap, you have the power to help close it, and we are here to provide the engineering support, testing infrastructure, and documentation to make your contribution world-class.
To our contributor, Imre Nagi: Thank you for your leadership on PBM-1588. You’ve made PBM better for thousands of users in the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem.
Ready to see what the community built? Check out our Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service documentation to see how to configure your oss storage provider today.
About the Author
Radoslaw SzulgoRadoslaw is a Senior Product Manager at Percona and responsible for driving Percona Software for MongoDB. He has more than 15 years of experience in building distributed applications as a product manager, leader, and software engineer. Radek is an Agile product development enthusiast and fan of personal development. Outside of work, he's an amateur volleyball player.
