I’m moving to Atlas after years of working fine with mLab.
I am planning to build a MongoDB/Atlas App with 1000s of users who are able to login and order items. I was thinking that should be easy in Atlas but NO!
https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/security-add-mongodb-users/
says:
Are they looking as “Users” as Admins and not as Customers?
Should I just login Customers and skip all the “User” authorization?
Looking for some good advice on this subject.
As wee see further, Atlas only allows 500 Atlas Users per project.
Not good enough. I need a real business database for 1000s of customers.
How do we get around these Atlas limitations?
I am not sure but you are misleading application users vs database users.
Application Users will be your subscribers and will interact with a web server of some sort.
The web server is one database user.
The webmaster can be a second user.
No. Thats another Topic.
Mongo says Atlas can only have 500 Atlas Users per project.
Thats not enough.
Hi @Alan_Gruskoff,
Welcome to the community forum. As @steevej notes, the Atlas restriction on Database Users is for accounts that log directly into your MongoDB deployment. Atlas Users are able to monitor and manage your Atlas clusters.
Using your original terminology, those are limits on admins rather than a limit on customers.
Direct access to your deployment should be limited to trusted database users connecting from a limited range of whitelisted IP addresses.
End users of your application (who are logging in and ordering items) should have accounts and permissions managed by your application or API.
The same user model should be followed for any database deployments. An application can scale to millions of users, but those are application users rather than database users.
Regards,
Stennie
OK, good explanation, Stennie.
So Mongo’s doc are wrongly worded. They don’t look at Customers as Users.
They look at Admins as Users, limit 500.
Now knowing MongoDB’s verbiage does not match the Real World, I will make adjustments to have Customers login to Authentication.
Hi Alan,
Unfortunately many terms (like “users” and “customers”) are overloaded and depend on context.
From an application point of view, your end users/customers should not not have direct access to underlying infrastructure like database deployments. Irrespective of whether you are using Atlas, your end users/customers should not translate 1:1 to database users. Your applications validate and manage end user requests to data; the only direct database users should be your applications and your DBAs.
The audience for Atlas documentation is your development and admin team, not your customers. From Atlas’ point of view, your admins and applications are Atlas Users and Database Users. Any reference to “customer” in the Atlas documentation is referring to you, as an Atlas customer.
Regards,
Stennie
Thanks for the Good Advice, Stennie. 
I got tripped up by the “Users” name.
On to the next thing…
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