MongoDB Atlas Features That Help You Do More With Less

With every interaction moving online and every experience becoming digitized, many development teams are faced with unexpected pressures and demands created by the COVID-19 situation.

In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the core features of and recent improvements to MongoDB Atlas that can help you adapt to the new normal, whether you’re just starting out or reconsidering your data infrastructure given the current circumstances.

Reduce Operational Overhead

Customers often tell us that the best part of our global cloud database is that they don’t have to worry about it: “it just works”. At a time when many businesses are uncertain about the future, it’s helpful to know that you can rely on your database.

Simply put, Atlas handles all of the heavy lifting behind database provisioning, maintenance, and upgrades. Select the cluster configuration you want using our UI or API and deploy a new cluster or update an existing cluster in minutes. Security patches and minor version upgrades are automatically applied, and all updates occur in a rolling fashion across your deployment to reduce performance impact to your applications. And if a node goes down, Atlas immediately elects a new primary and restores or replaces the offline node to ensure continuous availability.

Atlas also offers fully managed backup and restore functionality to ensure that your data is protected and recoverable. Whether you’re testing new ideas or made a fat-finger mistake, Atlas makes it easy to restore your database to a specific point in time. Simply define your point-in-time restore window and you can effectively set a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of near-zero.

Recently, we introduced several new features to make the database management experience even more effortless. With resilient backup snapshots, you can rest easy knowing that a snapshot will be taken even if your cluster is in an unhealthy state. We also improved our storage auto-scaling behavior to allow clusters to upgrade to the next tier if they are close to maxing out their disk space, minimizing any risk of downtime.

Save on Infrastructure Costs

Rationalizing your IT spend is always a good practice, but in situations like the current one, teams are more critical about where they’re spending their money. Not all applications are going to have a consistent workload in the short-term, which is why Atlas offers several options to lower the costs of running a cloud database when you experience periods of reduced traffic.

Like all other MongoDB Cloud products, Atlas is consumption-based, so you only pay for the resources you consume. Downscaling is as simple as a single API call or a few clicks in our cluster configuration editor, and you have the option to pause clusters for 30 days at a time (during which you’ll only be charged for storage costs).

With our new cluster tier auto-scaling feature now generally available, you can also opt into automatic up- and down-scaling of your cluster tiers (within predefined limits) based on key utilization metrics. For more prescriptive auto-scaling, use scheduled triggers to dictate when clusters should be up- or down-scaled.

Existing customers will also benefit from our recent changes that increased the connection limits and maximum storage to memory ratios on our most popular dedicated tiers. We also significantly lowered our pricing for NVMe clusters on AWS to support workloads that require low-latency and high-throughput IO.

Finally, the Performance Advisor is one of our most popular features in Atlas and one that we improve frequently. It surfaces index recommendations based on slow query logs of your database collections so that you can optimize performance without being a MongoDB expert. We recently updated our ranking algorithm, refreshed the UI, and added click-to-create index functionality to the tool to make it even easier to apply MongoDB best practices to your databases and help you use your resources efficiently.

Distribute Data Intelligently

Not only does Atlas automate most aspects of database deployment and management, but it also offers unique capabilities for distributing your data and optimizing performance that simply doesn’t exist with other cloud database solutions.

All Atlas clusters are deployed as a minimum three-node replica set and automatically distributed across availability zones to ensure that your database is highly available by default. If you need additional fault tolerance, simply add more nodes - Atlas is available in over 70 regions across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. And with Global Clusters, you can intelligently distribute data across zones to reach a global audience and offer a low-latency experience for your users, wherever they are.

When it comes to choosing a cloud provider, most companies choose the one that offers the best services and tools for their use case. However, now that global supply chains including cloud resources are being affected, it may be time to consider your multi-cloud strategy. Atlas helps de-risk your investments and avoid cloud lock-in by letting you seamlessly migrate workloads across clouds.

Make Your Database Work For You

We know that Atlas isn’t going to help solve all your problems, but we hope that it can at least reduce the amount of time and resources spent on database management. From intelligent automation to flexible billing and configurations, MongoDB Atlas offers you a hands-off experience while ensuring that your database does what it needs to do.

So what’s next?

• If you haven’t already, sign up for your MongoDB Atlas account today.
• Already using MongoDB? Check out our Cloud Migration Kickstart program.
• Working on a COVID-related idea? Apply for free Atlas credits.
• Questions on getting started? Check out our new Developer Hub, Community forums, and MongoDB University.
• Have an idea for a new Atlas feature? Submit it in our feedback portal.