This is a guest post by ObjectLabs Corporation/MongoLab. MongoLab is a partner of MongoDB, Inc. and not directly affiliated with the company.
If you are looking to run your application with MongoDB on Google Compute Engine, you may already be familiar with Google’s many powerful features that make it great for hosting your infrastructure: quick virtual machine (VM) spin-up time, incredibly fast networking, and live VM migrations.
At MongoLab, we offer our customers a fully-managed Database-as-a-Service platform that abstracts away the lower-level infrastructure layer and lets developers manage multi-node MongoDB clusters with ease. And we’ve partnered with all of the major cloud providers, including Google, to offer developers the same experience in whatever cloud they choose.
Fully-managed cloud MongoDB by MongoLab
The MongoLab platform includes everything you would expect for production database management: automated provisioning and scaling, backups, monitoring & alerting, a 24x7 emergency production support hotline, and more. To help developers be more productive when working with MongoDB, we created a suite of admin tools that provide beautiful data visualization and powerful database control.
Highly-Available MongoDB Cloud Hosting
First and foremost, MongoLab automates the entire lifecycle of MongoDB deployments. Provisioning, scaling, and deprovisioning are all handled by our cloud service, and all deployments are optimized for production workloads. On Google this means:
- Dedicated virtual machines backed by SSD persistent disks
- OS, filesystem, and database configurations optimized for MongoDB
- Multi-zone replication and automatic failover using MongoDB Replica Sets
- Zero-downtime scaling: horizontally via sharding and vertically via rolling upgrades
- Zero-downtime version upgrades
Automatic MongoDB Backups
A big part of managing your database is also planning for the unexpected. MongoLab makes it easy to make sure your data is always backed-up and safe:
- Free daily backups
- The ability to create any number of custom backup plans with configurable schedules and retention policies
- Automatic backup auditing to ensure backups are correctly taken according to schedule
- One-click restore
Monitoring and Alerting
Our robots are constantly monitoring the health and performance of every server in our fleet, ensuring that your database stays up and stays fast.
If you’d like to keep an eye on your deployment, we offer streaming, real-time performance metrics on our Real-time Dashboard in our web UI.
Performance Analytics and Insight
To ensure that your database stays fast, it’s crucial that your queries are well-indexed. Our Slow Query Analyzer identifies and analyzes slow queries to make index recommendations, which you can build straight from our management portal.
However, proper indexing can only get you so far if you have a data model that does not scale. As part of our free, expert support, we’ll also review your data model for any “gotchas” and offer suggestions where applicable. This comprehensive review is a huge benefit for our users, whether they are expecting rapid growth as they gear up for production or struggling to optimize their own deployments.
Security
MongoLab on Google has many attractive security features.
Starting with the storage layer, Google encrypts all data before it is written to disk (encryption at rest). This feature frees you from the hassle and risk of managing your own encryption and decryption keys.
Google also encrypts all network traffic within it’s cloud and prevents VMs from sniffing packets intended for other VMs. MongoLab enables you to provision your database in the same region as your application which ensures that all traffic is sent over an internal network, reducing the number of openings for malicious activity to take place.
For additional security, MongoLab allows you to firewall your database so that only your application infrastructure can connect to your server, regardless of who might gain access to your database credentials. MongoLab allows for custom firewalls on all of its Dedicated plans, configurable directly from our web management portal.
To secure external traffic, we’re currently in beta with native SSL support for MongoDB and are targeting a release towards the end of Fall 2014.
Web-based Management Tools
Our MongoDB GUI allows you to save common searches, set up tabular data views, and edit documents using a built-in JSON editor. These tools also allow you to manage current database operations, stream real-time logs, and perform other essential DBA functions.
Expert Support by Real Developers
If your application is in production you need an expert support team that is responsive 24x7. With our highly-available dedicated plans, we provide 24x7 emergency support which guarantees a timely response as well as Commercial Support - we carry the pagers so you can sleep well at night!
We welcome you!
With MongoLab, powerful MongoDB tools are right at your fingertips. Expert support is only an email away, and a fully-managed production cloud MongoDB is ready with just a few clicks. We look forward to helping you make your application a success and are always available at support@mongolab.com if you have questions.