A Geography is a named group of cloud provider regions inside which Atlas processes the content that you submit to certain Atlas services. A Geography is independent of the cloud provider region where your cluster stores data.
Use a Geography when you must show that Atlas processes particular data within a particular part of the world. If you have no such requirement, you don't need to select a Geography.
Note
Public Preview
The Europe Geography is available as a Public Preview feature. The feature and the corresponding documentation might change at any time during the Preview period.
Geographies and Cluster Regions
A Geography is a sibling concept to the cloud provider region where your cluster runs. The two boundaries are independent, and you set each one separately:
The region governs where Atlas stores your cluster's data. The cluster region is a single cloud provider region, such as
us-west-1oreu-west-2, that you choose when you provision a cluster.A Geography governs where Atlas processes the content that you submit to a Designated Service. The inference Geography groups cloud provider regions under one jurisdiction. You select it when you configure the service, and it remains unscoped until you set it.
Choosing a Geography does not move your cluster, and choosing a cluster region does not scope your processing. Because these two settings are independent, review them separately when you assess where Atlas processes your data.
To learn about the regions available for your cluster, see Cloud Providers and Regions.
Available Geographies
Atlas supports the following Geographies:
Geography | API Value | Regions | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
Europe |
| European Economic Area (EEA) | Processing runs in cloud provider regions inside the EEA. |
United States |
| United States | Processing runs in cloud provider regions inside the United States. |
The set of regions inside a Geography can change over time. The Geography boundary itself does not.
Designated Services
A Designated Service is a Atlas service that honors a Geography scope. When you send a scoped request to a Designated Service, Atlas processes that request inside the Geography.
The following table lists the Designated Services and the Geographies that each one supports:
Designated Service | Europe | United States |
|---|---|---|
Atlas Embedding and Reranking API Service | Yes | Yes |
To consume the Atlas Embedding and Reranking API within a Geography, you scope a model API key to that Geography when you create the key. To learn more, see Model API Keys.
Automated Embedding and Native Reranking also run inference in Atlas, but they don't support Geography targeting yet. You can't scope where Atlas processes the content that you submit to these services.
What a Geography Guarantees
When you send a request to a Designated Service using a model API key scoped to a Geography, the following commitments hold:
Atlas processes the content that you submit inside that Geography.
Request payloads that Atlas retains for logging are stored inside that Geography.
Atlas tags every request with the Geography that served it, so you can filter and audit usage records and invoices by Geography.
If the Geography cannot serve a request, the request fails. Atlas does not fall back to another Geography to serve the request.
Because a scoped request fails rather than running somewhere else, design your application to retry failed requests with backoff and to set a retry budget on your client. Do not fail over to a different Geography's endpoint unless processing in that Geography is acceptable for your use case.
A Geography constrains where Atlas processes your content, not your account. Account management, key management, resource policies, billing, and usage metadata operate globally regardless of the Geography you choose. This global metadata does not contain the content that you submit for processing.
Choosing a Geography
Use an unscoped model API key unless you must demonstrate that Atlas processes particular data within a particular part of the world. Unscoped keys work against ai.mongodb.com, draw on the largest pool of capacity, and are not restricted to a paid usage tier.
Before you scope a key to a Geography, note the following:
Atlas charges a 10% uplift on the tokens that you send to a scoped endpoint.
Scoped endpoints require a paid usage tier. To learn more, see Usage Tiers.
Scoped endpoints have their own rate limits, which are lower than those of the unscoped endpoint. To learn more, see Manage Rate Limits.
You set the Geography when you create the key and you can't change it afterward. To use a different Geography, create a new key.
Your organization can require that new model API keys be created in a given Geography. To learn more, see Model API Keys.
Learn More
To learn how Geographies apply to the Atlas Embedding and Reranking API, including Geography endpoints, rate limits, and available models, see Geographies for Voyage AI Inference in the Voyage AI documentation.
To learn about the cloud providers and regions that Atlas supports for clusters, see Cloud Providers and Regions.