Since we first launched MongoDB Atlas in June 2016, we’ve been working towards building a cloud database that not only delivers a first-class developer experience, but also simply just works: no setup, tuning, or maintenance required. Over the years, this has led to features like auto-scaling and click-to-create index suggestions, along with numerous optimizations to our automation engine.
We’re excited to announce that we’re one more step closer to realizing this vision with the introduction of serverless databases on MongoDB Atlas.
Think less about your database, and more about your data
Serverless computing and NoOps have emerged as popular trends in modern application development. Cloud functions are commonly used to power business logic in applications, and many teams rely on completely automated IT operations.
The appeal of serverless technology is hard to deny: elastic scaling eliminates the need for upfront resource provisioning and ongoing maintenance, and consumption-based pricing means paying only for resources that are used. It abstracts and automates away many of the lower-level infrastructure decisions that developers don’t want to have to learn or manage so they can focus on building differentiated features.
When it comes to databases, compute and storage resources have traditionally been tightly coupled. Applying a serverless model to databases means decoupling them and changing the way engineering teams think about infrastructure. Rather than asking a developer to predict an application’s future workload patterns, break them down into individual resource requirements, and then map them to arbitrary units of database instance sizes, serverless databases offer a much simpler experience: define where your data lives, and get a database endpoint you can use.
This not only streamlines the database deployment process, it also eliminates the need to monitor and adjust capacity on an ongoing basis. Developers are free to focus on thinking about their data rather than their databases, and leave the lower-level infrastructure decisions to intelligent, behind-the-scenes automation.
Serverless instances on MongoDB Atlas
All customers now have the ability to create a serverless database on MongoDB Atlas with the introduction of serverless instances, announced at MongoDB.live 2021.
It’s incredibly easy to get started: simply choose a cloud region and you’ll receive an on-demand database endpoint for your application. Serverless instances always run on the latest MongoDB version so you never have to worry about backwards compatibility or upgrades. You can view and manage them using the same UI and API as your existing database deployment on Atlas (i.e., clusters), and they come with end-to-end security, continuous uptime, metrics, alerts, and backups.
This new deployment type will be available in preview, so it doesn’t yet support all of the features and capabilities available on clusters today. It’s ideal for infrequent or sparse workloads, or development and testing workloads in the cloud. If you’re running a high-throughput production workload, dedicated clusters are still the recommended deployment option.
A hands-free database experience
This is the first of many releases, and we have an ambitious roadmap ahead. We will continue to invest in making working with data ever more seamless and delightful for developers, from adding support for newer Atlas capabilities like full-text search and native visualizations, to even more intelligent automation and optimization.
If you have feedback or questions, we’d love to hear them! Join our community forums to meet other MongoDB developers and see what they’re building with serverless instances.
What's next for MongoDB Atlas
Serverless instances are just one of many new additions to Atlas that we hope will make developers’ lives easier. Earlier this year, we added index removal suggestions to Performance Advisor and released a quick start for creating and managing clusters via the command line with the MongoDB CLI.
We are also working on integrations with Vercel and Netlify, two popular serverless application platforms, to give developers an easy way to get started on MongoDB Atlas.
What would make your development experience better on MongoDB Atlas? Share your feature requests in our feedback forums.