Alex Seaton from Man Group presented at QCon London 2025 on transitioning from a high-maintenance MongoDB server farm to a serverless database solution using object storage for hedge fund trading applications. He emphasized the advantages of serverless architecture, including improved storage management and concurrency models, while also addressing challenges like clock drift and the complexities of Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). Key takeaways highlighted the need for careful management of global state and the subtleties involved in using CRDTs and distributed locking mechanisms.

Amazon DocumentDB Serverless is now generally available, providing a configuration that automatically scales compute and memory based on application demand, leading to significant cost savings. It supports existing MongoDB-compatible APIs and allows for easy transitions from provisioned instances without data migration, making it ideal for variable, multi-tenant, and mixed-use workloads. Users can manage capacity effectively and only pay for what they use in terms of DocumentDB Capacity Units (DCUs).