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MongoDB Atlas FAQ

Features

MongoDB Atlas gives you access to all of MongoDB's core features of the database, including:

  • The latest feature set: MongoDB Atlas supports the two latest versions of MongoDB Server, with automatic patching and single-click upgrades.

  • High performance: The MongoDB WiredTiger storage engine with compression and fine-grained concurrency control ensures that you can meet your most demanding SLAs.

  • Scalability: One-click, automated sharding for scale out, and zero-downtime scale up to larger instance types. You can provision TBs of database storage, all on high performance SSDs with dedicated I/O bandwidth.

  • Global Clusters: Easily create and manage a single geographically dispersed database cluster that provides global, low-latency writes from anywhere in the world. MongoDB Atlas also supports global data distribution via cross-region replication, enabling multi-region fault tolerance and fast, responsive read access. Learn more →

  • Monitoring & alerts: Instant visibility into the database and hardware metrics that matter, so you stay ahead of any issues that could impact performance and user experience.

  • Strong security: Out-of-the-box protection of your most valuable data assets. Security features include TLS/SSL encryption, authentication, and authorization via SCRAM; network isolation and VPC Peering on AWS; IP access lists; encrypted storage volumes; and the MongoDB Atlas console to manage database users.

  • Highly available: A minimum of three data nodes per replica set are automatically deployed across availability zones (AWS), fault domains (Azure), or zones (GCP) for continuous application uptime in the event of outages and routine maintenance.

  • Workload Isolation: With MongoDB Atlas maintaining up to seven replicas of your data, you can concurrently run operational and analytical workloads across the same database, without resource contention.

  • Disaster recovery: Fully managed backup service with continuous, consistent backups and point-in-time recovery, backed by custom retention policies.

What is MongoDB Atlas?

MongoDB Atlas is a database as a service created by the experts who design and engineer MongoDB.

Launching an application on any database typically requires careful planning to ensure performance, high availability, security, and disaster recovery. For as long as you run your application, you have ongoing obligations that require deep expertise to continue to meet your operational goals. With MongoDB Atlas, most of this overhead goes away; Atlas provides all of the features of MongoDB while automating database administration tasks such as database configuration, infrastructure provisioning, patches, scaling events, backups, and more. This allows you to deliver applications or new features quickly, and focus on what matters most to you and your customers.

How much does MongoDB Atlas cost?

It is free to start with MongoDB Atlas for learning, prototyping, and early development. For dedicated clusters, MongoDB Atlas is billed hourly based on how much you use. The hourly rate depends on a number of factors, most importantly the size and number of servers you use. You will receive a single bill from MongoDB that explains your hourly use and backup fees.

For example, if you deploy on AWS a 3-node replica set of M40s and run it 24/7 for one month using the included 80GB of standard block storage, and you have exactly 80GB, your costs would be:

  • Per server hourly cost1: ~$0.34

  • Total servers: 3

  • Total hours: 720

  • Backup data: 80GB @ $2.50/GB/month

  • Total monthly fees paid to MongoDB: $946.79

What scale does MongoDB Atlas support?

MongoDB is one of the most scalable databases on the planet, and MongoDB Atlas brings you that same scalability, but with us managing it for you:

  • You can scale up or down on larger instance types with no application downtime

  • You can scale out across multiple instances with no application downtime using MongoDB’s native sharding capabilities

What MongoDB features does MongoDB Atlas not support?

  • Security cannot be disabled

  • Specialized replica set members: arbiters, hidden members, delayed secondaries

  • Reconfiguration of replica set member priority

  • Advanced configuration options (eg, maxConns)

  • If these features are important to your deployment, consider MongoDB Cloud Manager to help you manage your customized configuration.

Can I move my existing MongoDB deployment to MongoDB Atlas?

You can easily move an deployment to MongoDB Atlas with minimal impact to your application using the live migration feature in the application. Live migration works by keeping a cluster in MongoDB Atlas in sync with your source database until you’re ready to cut over.

You can also move small to medium size data sets with relatively little downtime using mongodump/mongorestore.

Can you help me move my existing deployment to MongoDB Atlas?

Yes. We have a dedicated consulting package for this purpose. Whether your deployment is running on-prem, is self-managed in the cloud, or was provisioned by another MongoDB hosting provider, we can help you to take full advantage of the benefits of MongoDB Atlas. Learn more here.

What am I responsible for when using MongoDB Atlas?

MongoDB Atlas automates infrastructure provisioning, setup, and deployment so your team can get the database resources they need, when they need them.

You are responsible for the following:

  • Schema design

  • Query and index optimization

  • Server size selection - you must select the appropriate size of server, coupled with IO and storage capacity

  • Capacity planning - you must determine when you need additional capacity, typically using the monitoring telemetry provided by MongoDB Atlas, but you can make these changes with no downtime

  • Initiating database restores

You also have the flexibility to choose when to initiate major version upgrades, while patches and minor version upgrades are applied automatically.

Is MongoDB building data centers all over the world?

No, we are not building data centers.

Instead, MongoDB Atlas runs on different cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, all of which provide extensive offerings in terms of data center location and SLAs. Initially we will support AWS, and are working to add support for other cloud platforms in the future.

What instance sizes are available to me?

You can choose from a range of instance sizes that are optimized for MongoDB. M10 and above are dedicated instances so you won't be impacted by “noisy neighbors.”

On Amazon Web Services

Instance NameRAMIncluded Storage
M0Shared512 MB
M2Shared2 GB
M5Shared5 GB
M102 GB10 GB
M204 GB20 GB
M308 GB40 GB
M4016 GB80 GB
M40 (low CPU)15.24 GB80 GB
M5032 GB160 GB
M50 (low CPU)30.5 GB160 GB
M6064 GB320 GB
M60 (low CPU)61 GB320 GB
M80 (low CPU)122 GB750 GB
M100160 GB1000 GB
M140192 GB1000 GB
M200256 GB1500 GB
M200 (low CPU)244 GB1500 GB
M300384 GB1500 GB
M400 (low CPU)488 GB3000 GB
Instance NameRAMIncluded Storage
*M40 (low CPU)15.24 GB80 GB
*M50 (low CPU)30.5 GB160 GB
*M60 (low CPU)61 GB320 GB
*M80 (low CPU)122 GB750 GB
*M200 (low CPU)244 GB1500 GB
*M400 (low CPU)488 GB3000 GB

You can also select different EBS storage sizes as well as high-performance provisioned IOPS for predictable performance.

On Microsoft Azure

Cluster NameRAMIncluded Storage
M0Shared512 MB
M2Shared2 GB
M5Shared5 GB
M203.75 GB32 GB
M307 GB32 GB
M4014 GB128 GB
M5028 GB128 GB
M6056 GB128 GB
M90140 GB128 GB

You can add storage capacity for your deployments. For deployments in Azure, storage speed is tied to storage capacity.

On Google Cloud Platform

Instance NameRAMIncluded Storage
M0Shared512 MB
M2Shared2 GB
M5Shared5 GB
M101.7 GB10 GB
M203.75 GB20 GB
M307.5 GB40 GB
M4015 GB80 GB
M5030 GB160 GB
M6060 GB320 GB
M80120 GB750 GB

You can add storage capacity for your deployments. For deployments in GCP, your disks get high performance IOPS provisioned automatically based on disk size.

What happens to my data if I want to leave MongoDB Atlas?

Because your data is continuously backed up, you can use MongoDB Atlas’s restore capabilities to generate a copy of your database for your own use, including seeding a new environment you manage yourself.

How does MongoDB Atlas assure high availability of my database?

MongoDB Atlas clusters are designed for resilience with a minimum three node replica set distributed across availability zones within a cloud region.

Self-Healing Clusters

If a primary node becomes unavailable, MongoDB Atlas will automatically perform a failover in seconds, with no need for manual intervention. For additional fault tolerance, configure secondary nodes across multiple regions in the unlikely event of a total region outage.

Uptime Guarantee

MongoDB Atlas clusters are highly available and backed by an industry-leading uptime SLA of 99.995% across all cloud providers.

How does MongoDB Atlas handle backups?

MongoDB offers fully managed backups of your data, including incremental data recovery and consistent, cluster-wide snapshots of sharded clusters.

Backups are charged separately from your MongoDB Atlas instances and are priced by total size of retained data. Pricing varies by region.

Cloud Backup

MongoDB Atlas backs up your data using the native snapshot capabilities of the cloud provider. Your backups are stored in the same cloud region as your managed databases.

You can set a customized Backup Policy to dictate how frequently snapshots are take and how long they're retained

Continuous Cloud Backup

This optional add-on to Cloud Backup continuously backs up your data, ensuring your backups are just a few seconds behind the operational system. MongoDB Atlas backs up the oplog, capturing data changes between snapshots. With point-in-time restores, you can choose a specific time (with minute-level granularity), and Atlas will roll through oplog changes to restore to that particular point.

You can set a customized Backup Policy to dictate how long a window of continuous backup to retain.

How does MongoDB Atlas secure my data?

MongoDB Atlas is security hardened by default.

Each MongoDB Atlas group is provisioned into its own VPC, thus isolating your data and underlying systems from other MongoDB Atlas users. Network encryption and access control are configured by default, and IP access lists allow you to specify a specific range of IP addresses against which access will be granted. All security-specific updates to the database software and underlying instances are automatically applied by MongoDB engineers.

For deployments running in AWS, VPC Peering can be used to connect your application servers deployed to another AWS VPC directly to your MongoDB Atlas cluster using private IP addresses.

All storage volumes on AWS, Azure, and GCP are automatically encrypted.

Enterprise Security features can be enabled for your MongoDB Atlas clusters. They include the following:

  • Bring your own key management service: Atlas supports the encrypted storage engine, a native encryption option for WiredTiger. With this option enabled, all database files are written to the filesystem encrypted and customers maintain control over the encryption keys for their fully managed clusters.

  • Database-level auditing: For regulatory compliance, security administrators can use MongoDB Atlas to retrieve audit logs tracking DML, DDL, and DCL operations taken against a managed cluster.

  • LDAP integration: Atlas offers integration with customer LDAP servers to simplify access control and granular permissions management for users and applications.

Read the MongoDB Atlas Security Controls white paper for more information about MongoDB Atlas security and data security.

What monitoring and performance optimization features does MongoDB Atlas offer?

MongoDB Atlas includes an integrated set of features for database monitoring and performance optimization, including:

  • More than 100 metrics related to the database and the underlying infrastructure, including disk usage, active connections, operations, and disk IOPS, provided in optimized charts

  • Real-time performance panel that displays current network traffic, database operations, and infrastructure statistics, and highlights the hottest collections and long-running queries

  • Built-in Performance Advisor that monitors slow queries and provides index recommendations to optimize query performance

  • Customizable alerts so you can react to anomalies

Does MongoDB Atlas meet compliance standards that test for data safety, privacy, or security?

  • Service Organization Control (SOC) Reports are independent third-party examination reports that demonstrate how the MongoDB Atlas service achieves key compliance controls and objectives. The purpose of these reports is to help you and your auditors understand the controls established to support operations and compliance.

    • MongoDB has completed its SOC 2 Type II report on MongoDB Atlas.
  • MongoDB, Inc. is also certified under the EU-US Privacy Shield. View the certification here.

  • For customers who are subject to the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, MongoDB Atlas supports HIPAA compliance and enables covered entities and their business associates to use a secure MongoDB Atlas environment to process, maintain, and store protected health information. MongoDB, Inc. will enter into Business Associate Agreements covering MongoDB Atlas with customers as necessary under HIPAA,

  • MongoDB Atlas infrastructure runs on top of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform; each cloud provider undergoes its own series of independent third-party audits on a regular basis.

Learn more about MongoDB Cloud Services Compliance.

What support is included with MongoDB Atlas?

MongoDB Atlas includes support for the cloud database platform and product usage inquiries including but not limited to database connectivity, data migration, guidance on product features, API implementation, billing and account issues, and more. Our teams will also take care of database maintenance with automated patches and bug fixes, and ensure that your databases are available (see our reliability SLA) and properly configured. If there are issues with the underlying infrastructure, we will work directly with the cloud vendors to resolve them.

When your account is created, you will have access to 30 days of free end to end support, which includes support for the database software. You may purchase Atlas Pro or Atlas Enterprise to extend access to end to end support from MongoDB Technical Services Engineers and gain additional benefits such as unlimited usage of premium features and additional software from MongoDB, Inc.

For more information about Atlas Pro or Atlas Enterprise, please contact us.

Can I use my own reserved instances from my cloud hosting provider to reduce my costs?

You cannot bring your reserved instances to MongoDB Atlas. With MongoDB Atlas, we distribute your replica set members across availability zones to ensure that you have a highly available cluster by default. Also, the price you pay is based off of reserved instance pricing for the underlying infrastructure.

How is MongoDB Atlas priced for development, test, or QA environments?

There are no pricing tiers for development, test, and QA environments. MongoDB Atlas and MongoDB Atlas support (support for the underlying database) is priced the same regardless of environment type.

Are we subject to the AGPL v3 or Server Side Public License (SSPL) v1 if we use MongoDB Atlas?

No. MongoDB Atlas is a database as a service where we run the software on your behalf.

How does MongoDB Atlas compare to other MongoDB as a Service offerings?

Check out the comparison page.