Serverless application development is quickly gaining popularity as a preferred way of building and running modern applications. With developers looking for solutions to speed development and provide even greater abstraction from the underlying infrastructure supporting those applications, it’s no surprise that the concept of serverless is extending beyond compute services to now databases as well.
To continue delivering a modern developer experience for our users, MongoDB has recently introduced serverless databases in Atlas, currently available in preview. This new deployment option eliminates the process of capacity sizing and management altogether, and instead provides an on-demand endpoint that seamlessly scales based on workload demand and only charges for the resources used.
If that sounds compelling, you might be wondering what can I build with a serverless database? The scalability and cost model naturally make them a great option for workloads that are infrequent and have cycles of usage combined with longer idle periods - like CRON jobs that run weekly or monthly. Because of this, we challenged users in a recent Atlas hackathon to use serverless databases as the backend to automate a weekly task - and some of the end results were pretty cool!
Track your weekly fitness goals
If you’re looking for a way to hold yourself accountable for your fitness goals, why not use an app to track your progress? This app uses Atlas to store and automate the weekly data aggregation and analysis - so you know if you’re meeting your goals.
Automate the collection and delivery of your favorite web content
Want to stay up to date on all the latest developer content from your favorite sites like Dev and Hashnode? This web app automatically compiles the latest articles from developer sites once a day and delivers up to 5 titles to your inbox based on keywords you’ve provided. It uses an Atlas database to store all the data and is hosted on Netlify using Netlify Serverless Functions as the backend service.
Track your productivity for better work/life balance
Finding the right work/life balance can be difficult without a true understanding of how you're spending your time - something a KanBan board is great at helping with. This submission uses an Atlas database along with Azure functions to automate the process of creating monthly reports from a Notion kanban board - eliminating the manual task and freeing up more time to get work done.
If you’re interested in what else is possible with Atlas check out the other submissions here.
Are you ready to try serverless?
These are just a few of the ways you can use a serverless database in MongoDB Atlas but by no means the only use case. If you’re in the early stages of building a new application and aren’t sure of the level of scale to expect, serverless may be a great choice - enabling you to start quickly without the added cognitive load of worrying about infrastructure requirements. Or maybe you already have an app up and running but need a more effective dev/test environment - consider trying serverless as a way to optimize your resource spend.
Are you ready to build your next app? Give Atlas serverless databases a try today and share your experience with us in our community forums!