AI Demand is Constant, Unpredictable, and Extreme. MongoDB is Built for It.

When a huge surge in demand meets limited resources, an awful experience usually isn’t far behind. Fans feel it when trying to compete for concert tickets with bots and scalpers. Diners feel it when they try to get a reservation at a trendy restaurant that’s fully booked for months. Websites and applications feel it when they go viral and get an accidental DDoS from a “Reddit Hug of Death.”

Unpredictable spikes in demand are only becoming more common, and scaling resources to meet them is hard. In my lifetime, I’ve seen big shifts in the amount of demand systems need to handle. First, the internet era, then the cloud era, we saw increased demand that was often predictable. Think of an annual flash sale or regular seasonality. Things might speed up, with more frequent spikes, but they were still spikes you could plan around.

Then AI happened. And this is where we live now: demand that’s constant, unpredictable, and extreme, increasing in frequency and intensity at the same time. If the internet era taught customers to expect an instant response, then the AI era is teaching them to expect something else: instant value. You can snap a photo of something you want, and an agent can identify it, buy it, and have it on your doorstep tomorrow. Those capabilities cut both ways. Change now hits every layer underneath faster and harder than before. The user isn't only human anymore. Agents are in the product too.

Agents don’t ease in. The second they’re on, they hit your system with massive, simultaneous reads and writes. They also take in and act on more information at once than any team of people ever could. Enterprises need a data layer built for that reality, where the only predictable thing is how unpredictable the load will be. Teams that can scale into those spikes will be the ones that last.

Introducing Atlas Infinite

Today, we're announcing Atlas Infinite, the largest architectural innovation for MongoDB Atlas ever. Atlas Infinite is purpose-built to handle the speed of development and unpredictable demand of applications that customers expect, with independent scaling of compute and storage to absorb sudden bursts of traffic.

Atlas Infinite is not a new database. It's a new deployment option within Atlas. Same document model, same drivers and APIs, no code changes required. Also, the current deployment option you know and love as MongoDB Atlas is not going anywhere. It just has a new name, MongoDB Atlas Core. Atlas Core and Atlas Infinite are the two database deployment options within the Atlas platform. You pick the right one for each workload.

How does Atlas Infinite deal with four key scaling and future-proofing problems organizations are dealing with today?

1. Scaling delay: Gone. Atlas Infinite cuts read scaling time by more than 96% compared to Atlas Core. Compute and storage automatically scale independently within minutes, not hours.

2. Storage ceiling: 10x higher. Atlas Infinite grows with you, from prototype to a petabyte, on the same foundation. You scale on your terms, when you need more performance, not when you run out of room. Atlas Infinite supports replica sets that hold 10x the data of replica sets in Atlas Core. 

3. Capacity planning: No more guesswork. Atlas Infinite meets your needs in real time as you scale up and down. Atlas Infinite also runs more efficiently on the same hardware compared to Atlas Core, so you get nearly triple the performance per dollar.

4. Re-architecture: Not required. Zero application changes required. Enjoy more elasticity and scalability on literally the same database.

This isn't only a scalability story. It's a more capable, more performant engine. Internal tests* using MongoDB 9.0 have shown that Atlas Infinite provides 189% more throughput per dollar compared with Atlas Core. And customers like Icon Solutions are using it to drive more growth.

"Atlas Infinite let us process 55% more transactions per second than our equivalent previous setup on MongoDB 8.0, with zero application changes. In payments, that kind of headroom without a re-architecture means faster, more reliable experiences for the customers on the other end of every transaction," said Mike Wallis, Head of DevOps at Icon Solutions.

Atlas Infinite is available as a public preview, and I can’t wait for you to try out the next generation of MongoDB Atlas.

MongoDB 9.0: The best version of MongoDB ever

In addition, we just released the best version of MongoDB ever, MongoDB 9.0. We’ve hardened the core to ensure a rock-solid foundation for the most demanding enterprises, and we’re setting a new bar for security, durability, availability, and performance.

That bar was already high. MongoDB 8.0 was released just two years ago, and today, nearly 80% of our Atlas fleet has adopted it, with higher customer satisfaction and stronger retention among these customers.

We are proud of what 8.0 delivered, and 9.0 pushes further still. Here are some of my favorite enhancements in MongoDB 9.0.

Performance*: 

• In our internal tests against MongoDB 8.0, MongoDB 9.0 delivers:

• Up to 35% faster find-one queries

• Up to 30% faster update-one queries

• Up to 2x throughput on large instances

• Up to 20% higher throughput for transactional workloads

Security:

• Queryable Encryption now supports prefix, suffix, and substring searches, allowing organizations to query sensitive information without ever decrypting it. 

• Expanded private networking capabilities make it easier to deploy MongoDB Atlas securely across complex enterprise environments.

Durability and Availability:

• Intelligent Workload Management automatically protects clusters when they are overloaded with requests and ensures short-running operations continue when demand is unpredictable.

• Enhanced backup, restore, and recovery capabilities help organizations to maintain application availability and speed recovery when disruptions occur.

Observability & Developer Productivity:

• Expanded observability into application and database performance

• New developer productivity features that make it easier to modernize applications with familiar tools and frameworks, without costly rewrites.

MongoDB 9.0 continues to give you the freedom to run anywhere. MongoDB 9.0 is available in MongoDB Atlas and in self-managed environments through MongoDB Enterprise Advanced and MongoDB Community Edition.

MongoDB 9.0 on Atlas Infinite changes the calculus on scale. It's not something you plan around anymore, it's just there when you need it. There's never been a better time to build on MongoDB.

*Performance results are based on internal MongoDB testing comparing MongoDB 9.0 and MongoDB 8.0 using public benchmark methodologies. Results may vary by workload, deployment, hardware, and configuration.