MongoDB Atlas — Technical Overview & Benefits

Intro

MongoDB Atlas, which launched in June of 2016, is a battle-tested database-as-a-service platform (DBaaS) artfully designed and built by the same team that created and continues to nurture and grow MongoDB. MongoDB Atlas is a true blessing to the development community; it provides all of the features of its database counterpart, without the operation and heavy lifting normally required when building new applications, letting you focus on what you do best.

One of the most convenient parts about MongoDB Atlas is that it is available on-demand through a pay-as-you-go model and billed on an hourly basis, meaning you don’t have to worry about monthly subscriptions or paying for things you don’t use. Sound intriguing? Let’s jump in!

Getting Started

MongoDB Atlas features a minimalistic interface that makes it dead simple to get up and running. Simply select your instance size, instance region, and any features you need; Atlas will provision the instance accordingly and provide you with the following:

• Automated Security Features — MongoDB Atlas makes sure you know who’s got eyes on your data and helps you keep all others out.
• Built-In Replication — Their platform provides you with multiple servers for always-on availability, to make sure you’re up, even when your primary master is down.
• Backups and Point-In-Time Recovery — MongoDB Atlas’ system makes strong efforts to protect against data corruption, intentional or not (think of it as your own personal ninja). ;)
• Fine-Grained Monitoring — You’ll have a ton of info, organized in many ways, to help you recognize when it’s time to take things to the next level (additional instances can be provisioned with the push of a button).
• Automated Patching and One-Click Upgrades — You get to take advantage of the latest and greatest MongoDB features as they come out, with MongoDB Atlas’ automated patching and one-click upgrades for new major versions of the database.
• Options for Complementary Tools — You get to choose things like which regions and billing options you’d like to use, making your instance really feel like your own creation. (Soon, you’ll also get choose from a handful of different cloud providers, too!)

Versatility & Zero Lock-In

MongoDB Atlas has an insane amount of flexibility in complexity and, therefore, what it can help you accomplish. It’s great for everything from a down and dirty POC, to QA environments, to full on production clusters.

Decide you want to bring operations back under your control? No worries. It’s easy to move your databases onto your own infrastructure. You can manage them using MongoDB Ops Manager or MongoDB Cloud Manager (above); the user experience across MongoDB Atlas, Cloud Manager, and Ops Manager is always consistent, ensuring that disruption is minimal if you decide to venture out on your own ;)

Automation at the Core

MongoDB Atlas provides the functionality and reliability you need, with its built-in automation mechanisms. With MongoDB Atlas, you no longer need to worry about operational tasks such as:

• Provisioning & Configuration — Atlas walks you through the setup process with a handful of intuitive steps, so you don’t have to worry about knowing what specs to choose if you’re not a veteran (or even if you are).
• Patching & Upgrades — MongoDB Atlas is built on MongoDB 3.2, Community Server, with automatic patching and single-click upgrades. They happen in minutes, with no downtime.
• Monitoring & Alerts — You get instant visibility into the database and hardware metrics that matter, so you stay ahead of any issues that could impact performance and user experience.
• Disaster Recovery — MongoDB Atlas has a fully managed backup service with continuous, consistent backups and point-in-time recovery, backed by custom retention policies — because disasters aren’t predictable.

Flexibility & Support

Only MongoDB Atlas combines the critical capabilities of relational databases with the innovations of NoSQL. Radically simplify development and operations by delivering a diverse range of capabilities in a single, managed database platform.

If there are issues with the underlying infrastructure, MongoDB Atlas will work directly with the cloud vendors to resolve them. If a bug is encountered with MongoDB, there is a strong community that actively collaborates on issues in MongoDB’s own dashboard. You also have the option to purchase MongoDB Atlas Support to gain expert support for the underlying database provided with the service.

Security

MongoDB Atlas provides multiple levels of security for your database. These include robust access control, network isolation using Amazon VPCs and VPC Peering, IP whitelists, encryption of data in-flight using TLS/SSL, and optional encryption of the underlying filesystem.

Scalability

MongoDB Atlas grows with you, all with the click of a button. You can scale up across a range of instance sizes, and scale-out with MongoDB Atlas’ “automatic sharding”. Best of all, you can scale up or out with zero application downtime.

Atlas provides horizontal scale-out for databases using a technique called sharding, which is transparent to applications. MongoDB distributes data across multiple Replica Sets called shards. With automatic balancing, MongoDB ensures data is equally distributed across shards as data volumes grow or the size of the cluster increases or decreases. Sharding allows MongoDB deployments to scale beyond the limitations of a single server, such as bottlenecks in RAM or disk I/O, without adding complexity to the application.

MongoDB Atlas supports three types of sharding policy, enabling administrators to accommodate diverse query patterns:

• Range-based sharding: Documents are partitioned across shards according to the shard key value. Documents with shard key values close to one another are likely to be co-located on the same shard. This approach is well suited for applications that need to optimize range-based queries.
• Hash-based sharding: Documents are uniformly distributed according to an MD5 hash of the shard key value. Documents with shard key values close to one another are unlikely to be co-located on the same shard. This approach guarantees a uniform distribution of writes across shards, provided that the shard key has high cardinality, making it optimal for write-intensive workloads.
• Zones: MongoDB Zones which allow precise control over where data is physically stored, accommodating a range of deployment scenarios. For example by geography, by hardware configuration, or by application.

Highly Available

MongoDB Atlas is designed to offer exceptional uptime. Recovery from instance failures is transparent and fully automated. A minimum of three copies of your data are replicated across availability zones and continuously backed up.

Additionally, every MongoDB Atlas cluster is deployed as a self-healing replica set which provides automatic failover in the event of a failure. Replica set members are automatically provisioned by MongoDB Atlas across multiple availability zones within a region, providing resilience to localized site failures.

High Performance

MongoDB Atlas provides high throughput and low latency for the most demanding workloads. Consistent and predictable performance eliminates the need for separate caching tiers, and delivers a far better price-performance ratio compared to traditional database software.

Final Thoughts

MongoDB is the next-generation database used by the world’s most sophisticated organizations, cutting-edge startups and large companies, alike, to create applications never before possible, at a fraction of the cost of legacy databases. One of the biggest reasons to use MongoDB Atlas is that it’s in it with you for the long haul; you don’t have to worry about finding a new product as you scale. It will keep an eye on production and security for you and has insanely high throughput and low latency, even at a high scale. MongoDB’s Atlas team produces with developers in mind and they’re with you every step of the way.

MongoDB Atlas makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale your MongoDB deployments in the cloud because it is intuitive and highly automated. They’ve taken the guesswork and intensive labor out of building and maintaining infrastructure, but they’ll still let you have say where you want to. They’ll get you up and running and their replication will help you stay there. From high availability to scalability, security to disaster recovery — the MongoDB Atlas platform has you covered.