MongoDB to terminate Russian SaaS accounts

No service for NoSQL users contrasts with continuous clouds from other players

NoSQL database challenger MongoDB has decided it won't sell its wares in Russia – not even its software-as-a-service offering.

News of the cancellation emerged from Oleg Brodt, chief innovation officer of Cyber@BGU at Israel's Ben Gurion university:

MongoDB is terminating Russian accounts. Makes you wonder how your IT may look like if other IaaS, PaaS and SaaS providers will decide to shut you down. What if AWS decided to shut down your account? How business critical is your reliance on the cloud? pic.twitter.com/UerJ4TGPMn

— Oleg Brodt (@BrodtOleg) March 12, 2022

A MongoDB spokesperson confirmed the situation, and sent The Register the following statement:

The breadth of the new sanctions from the US and internationally is unprecedented, and MongoDB has taken action to comply with them. We will not sell our cloud services to customers in Russia and Belarus and we will not sell any more MongoDB software to customers in Russia or Belarus.

MongoDB's decision appears to hinge on an interpretation of Western sanctions that says SaaS subscriptions represent a sale. So in order to comply with sanctions it should not continue to offer its wares, even as a service.

That's a different stance to that taken by other tech companies, which have stopped sales to and operations within Russian and Belarus, though continued providing support services and allowed existing customers to continue employing their wares.

That position earned Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft a rebuke from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who asked for the three to end support for Russian clients.

Ukraine's elected representatives have continued to pressure Big Tech to help it fight back against Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine.

Vice prime minister and minister for digital transformation Mykhailo Fedorov has offered the following suggestion:

If Apple and Google notify all the smartphones in the world about the constant Russian shelling of Ukraine, all the people would force their governments to close the sky over Ukraine because of war horrors.

— Mykhailo Fedorov (@FedorovMykhailo) March 13, 2022

Fedorov has also promoted a website he says will allow anyone to donate cryptocurrency to Ukraine to fund its effort to drive out occupying Russian forces. ®