4 New MongoDB Features to Improve Security and Operations

Data platforms are designed to remove operational complexity and enable developers to move and innovate faster. For applications that are critical to your users and your business, the data platform powering them must also be reliable, scalable, and global. Achieving that should take minimal work, both upfront and on an ongoing basis.

At MongoDB World 2022, we announced several new capabilities that further help organizations achieve operational excellence: Queryable Encryption, Cluster-to-Cluster Sync, Scheduled Archiving, MongoDB Atlas Operator for Kubernetes, and MongoDB Atlas Serverless.

With the introduction of Queryable Encryption, MongoDB will be the only database provider that allows customers to run expressive queries such as equality and range, prefix, suffix, substring and more on fully randomly encrypted data, just as they can do on unencrypted data.

This is a huge advantage for organizations that need to run expressive queries while also securing their data. Queryable Encryption reduces the heavy lifting involved when working with encrypted data, resulting in faster app development without undermining data protection or compliance with data privacy regulations.

Not every organization is fully — or may ever be fully — in the cloud. Many businesses also leverage hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Cluster-to-Cluster Sync enables continuous, uni-directional, real-time data synchronization of two MongoDB clusters in the same or different environments — public cloud, private cloud, on-premises, and at the edge. MongoDB now supports, for example, hybrid Atlas and Enterprise Advanced deployments, wherein a cluster’s data can be synced from on-prem to Atlas, or vice versa.

With Cluster-to-Cluster Sync, organizations have full control of the synchronization process. They can decide when to start, stop, pause, or resume your synchronization, or to reverse the direction of synchronization. And they can monitor the progress of the synchronization in real time.

This new capability will enable greater experimentation and innovation, increase organizational insights, and help developers find more efficient ways to work with data. Use cases that benefit from having the data of two MongoDB clusters fully synchronized include data migration, enhanced development lifecycles, dedicated analytics, audit compliance, and improving latency by moving data to the edge.

The MongoDB Atlas Operator for Kubernetes is the best way to use MongoDB with Kubernetes. With the Atlas Operator, developers can seamlessly integrate MongoDB Atlas into their Kubernetes deployment pipeline, controlling Atlas resources without leaving the Kubernetes control plane. They can also control Atlas projects, clusters, database users, backup policy, serverless instances, private network endpoints, and more. The operator is compatible with any certified Kubernetes distribution, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Red Hat OpenShift, and dozens more.

We are enhancing the Online Archive feature of Atlas with two new features: Data expiration and scheduled archiving. With data expiration, you can define and automate for how long you need the data stored in the online archive before getting deleted. With the scheduled archiving feature, you can set rules about the time window of when you want the archive to run. This could be daily, weekly or monthly. You can also edit the archive rule and define when you want to archive your data and when you want it deleted from the archive.

One big trend in the developer world is removing operational overhead by moving to a managed database offering. This move away from day-to-day management and administration lets developers do what they do best — create. To this end, MongoDB has rolled out Atlas Serverless. With Atlas Serverless, server provisioning and management has been abstracted (hidden) from the customer or end-user of the service. This eliminates the cognitive load of sizing and scaling infrastructure to keep up with application demand. Instead of paying for idle resources, with Atlas Serverless, you pay for only what you use. By simplifying provisioning, Atlas Serverless helps organizations accelerate time to market and improve experiences for both developers and IT managers.

All of these new features have been designed to help organizations improve their operational excellence, ensuring security, consistency, and scale while alleviating repetitive operational tasks for developers and IT managers.