MongoDB unveils cloud-based NoSQL database-as-a-service offering

Focus on the application, not database management, argues MongoDB

MongoDB has unveiled a database-as-a-service offering intended to slash the management overheads of operating a NoSQL database so that customers can focus on developing their big-data applications.

Announced at the company's MongoDB World event in New York, MongoDB Atlas is described as the simplest, most robust and most cost-effective way to run MongoDB in the cloud. The service is available now hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with availability planned for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud in the future.

MongoDB Atlas has been designed to make running MongoDB as effortless as possible, whether customers are running a single replica set or a sharded cluster hosting 100TB, claims Eliot Horowitz, the firm's co-founder and chief technology officer.

The service has been designed to be self-managing to a certain extent, offering scalability via scaling up through a range of instance sizes, or scaling out with automatic sharding, all with no application downtime, the firm said. And if something more serious goes wrong, MongoDB engineers will step in to fix it.

"There are no servers to set up, configure or manage, no backups to schedule, no need to set up monitoring or look for security vulnerabilities," Horowitz wrote on the MongoDB blog.

"If a server goes down in the night, the system takes care of it for you. And if something cannot be fixed automatically, our 24/7 response team is paged, not you."

MongoDB Atlas is based partly on existing code. It is built on some of the components created for the firm's current cloud offerings, while the self-managing piece, Automation, has been available for two years, delivering reliable cluster creation, rolling upgrades and configuration changes for thousands of MongoDB deployments in production, according to the firm.

The new platform's elastic scaling means that it also offers elastic pricing, as customers might expect from a cloud-hosted product.

"With Atlas you pay for exactly what you use, and we bill your credit card on a monthly basis. You can spin up a cluster for a few hours to kick the tyres for just a few dollars, and run your largest, most mission-critical workloads with confidence and predictable pricing," Horowitz said.