Today’s applications are expected to just work, regardless of time of day, user traffic, or where in the world they are being accessed. To achieve this level of performance and scale, developers need to ensure they have the proper infrastructure resources in place to handle user demand, which often leads to time wasted on non-differentiating work. Organizations that want to stay competitive and rapidly innovate must look for solutions that simplify the process and enable them to speed time to development. Enter serverless.
What’s the big deal with serverless?
Serverless technologies allow developers to build applications without thinking about resource provisioning and scaling. As a result, developers are increasingly adopting a serverless-first approach to application development as a means to move fast, optimize costs, and eliminate the operational overhead of deploying and managing infrastructure.
With application demand and user expectations growing faster than ever, serverless is becoming an essential component of application modernization strategies for both emerging startups and enterprises alike, with more and more organizations beginning to adopt function-as-a-service (FaaS) solutions, popular serverless frameworks, and now even serverless databases.
Atlas serverless instances now generally available
With MongoDB Atlas, our mission is and always has been to empower developers to move fast and simplify how they build with data for any application. Newer developers don’t have time to learn the intricacies of deploying and managing databases, nor should they have to. Recognizing this shift, we have been focused on building a developer data platform that minimizes this challenge. We started by launching services like Atlas Functions and Atlas Triggers and then moved to the data layer, first adding auto-scaling, then releasing Atlas serverless instances, our serverless database deployment option, in public preview in July 2021. Today, we are excited to announce that serverless instances are now generally available (GA).
With serverless instances, you can quickly deploy a database with minimal configuration—just choose your cloud provider and region, and get the full power of MongoDB with the benefits of the serverless model . Once you’ve deployed your database, the serverless instance will take care of the scaling for you, with the ability to scale up or down from zero without any cold starts, and will only charge you for the operations you run.
What’s new in serverless instances
With this GA release, serverless instances will now offer additional features, such as private networking with AWS PrivateLink, enhanced monitoring and alerting capabilities, and extended backup retention with point-in-time recovery. Also, serverless instances are now compatible to use with our other serverless cloud services, such as the Atlas Data API and Atlas Functions, making building end-to-end serverless applications even easier.
We’ve also dropped our prices (up to 60% in certain regions), to improve usage costs, with tiered pricing for reads that gives you automatic discounts on your daily usage without any up-front commitments or the need to talk to a sales rep. With this model, you can scale your usage without the fear of surprises.
Develop modern serverless applications of any scale with Atlas
The MongoDB Atlas data platform lets you build modern applications of any scale. Unlike other serverless databases, Atlas provides the full power and flexibility of the document model, so you can structure data for a variety of different use cases, instead of being limited to only simple key/value workloads. Additionally, our unified query API allows you to run MongoDB anywhere with a consistent experience—whether it’s on your laptop, a dedicated cluster, or a serverless instance—without ever changing your app code.
Already using other serverless solutions in your application stack today? Atlas connects seamlessly with other leading serverless tools—from FaaS, to app development platforms, and frameworks—so you can continue working with the solutions you already know and love. And, most importantly, serverless instances are hosted on the same reliable Atlas foundation that is already trusted by organizations of all sizes today, from disruptive startups to some of the world's largest enterprises.
Get started today
Serverless databases are incredibly flexible and we’ve seen them perform well for lightweight or infrequent application workloads, such as application development and testing, or QA environments, event-driven applications, and periodic cron jobs.
Are you ready to give serverless instances a try? Deploy your first serverless database today to see just how easy it is to get a cloud data endpoint for your application.