NEW YORK—As has been expected, MongoDB, maker of the NoSQL database by the same name, today announced MongoDB Atlas, its database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offering.
MongoDB Atlas is an elastic, on-demand cloud service that includes all necessary infrastructure and turnkey management of the MongoDB database for users. The service will be available initially on Amazon Web Services, followed by Microsoft Azure and then Google Cloud Platform.
"MongoDB Atlas takes everything we know about operating MongoDB and packages it into a convenient, secure, elastic, on-demand service," said Dev Ittycheria, president and CEO of MongoDB, in a statement. "This new offering is yet another major milestone for the most feature rich and popular database for modern applications, and expands the options for how customers can consume the technology – in their own data centers, in the cloud, and now as a service."
MongoDB announced its new service at the MongoDB World 2016 conference here. As the new service is built and operated by the engineers who build and maintain MongoDB, developers can be assured that all aspects of the offering, such as provisioning, configuration, patching, upgrades, backups, failure recovery and more, will be handled efficiently.
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Ittycheria said MongoDB Atlas provides high availability in an offering that is fault-tolerant and self-healing. It also provides transparent recovery from failures and continuously monitors and backs up customer databases. A minimum of three copies of user data are replicated across availability zones and continuously backed up for customer safety.
This is MongoDB's first foray into the DBaaS arena.
"We welcome MongoDB into the DBaaS arena," said Will Shulman, CEO of mLab, a 5-year-old company offering MongoDB as a service. mLab currently has more than 300,000 MongoDB deployments and more customers than MongoDB itself, Shulman claims. "It's a huge endorsement of the cloud database space we helped pioneer over the last five years."
Shulman noted that with the DBaaS market forecasted to grow from around $1 billion in 2014 to nearly $14 billion by 2019, it is clear that the old model of enterprise software sales is in decline and that the best way for developers to consume software infrastructure is through the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
A Competitive DBaaS Market
Indeed, the DBaaS market is competitive, as IBM last year acquired Compose, which offers among its many solutions a MongoDB-as-a-service offering. Big Blue later invested additional resources into Compose, adding new services along with tools and support for building Web and mobile apps.
In that regard, Shulman said mLab has grown to host more than 300,000 MongoDB deployments across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure and Google in five years, with a focus on the developer and a 100 percent increase in customers over the past year.
"This humongous market will obviously result in specialization, and we expect MongoDB will continue to have its eye on the Fortune 500 and large IT organizations, just as we will continue to focus on the broader market with our developer-centric approach, leveraging the open-source version of MongoDB," he said. "In all cases, this is a win for the broader MongoDB community."
MongoDB Atlas delivers high throughput and low latency for read and write operations at virtually any scale and can deliver 80 percent cost reduction compared with traditional enterprise database software, Ittycheria said.
"The day we founded MongoDB, we envisioned a world where developers could focus on what's most important, turning their giant ideas into innovative applications—MongoDB Atlas embodies just that," said Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of MongoDB, in a statement. "By running on MongoDB Atlas, developers can trust that their applications will be highly available, secure, scale seamlessly, and without the downtime that comes from applying patch updates. MongoDB Atlas is the culmination of over five years of building software to run MongoDB in the cloud."
MongoDB Atlas Deployed Across a Number of Public Clouds
According to MongoDB officials, a recent survey of more than 2,000 members of the MongoDB community showed that 30 percent of respondents deploy on more than one public cloud. MongoDB Atlas will be deployed across several public clouds.
"Azure support for MongoDB Atlas reinforces Microsoft's commitment to providing enterprise customers with even more choice and a complete platform that can manage both structured and unstructured data with security, consistency and credibility," said Mitra Azizirad, general manager of Cloud Application Development and Data at Microsoft, in a statement. "This partnership further underscores that Microsoft offers the most complete cloud platform on the market."
Available now, MongoDB Atlas offers an elastic pricing model that is metered on hourly usage, the company said. Indeed, a wide range of instance sizes, storage performance and backup schedules are available to meet the specific demands of any deployment.
"MongoDB Atlas hits the sweet spot between do-it-yourself and hands off when it comes to managed database infrastructure," said Aaron King, vice president of product engineering at Social News Desk, an early MongoDB Atlas user, in a statement. "MongoDB Atlas makes it easy to spin up a complex, high-availability database cluster in just a few minutes. The performance monitoring and metrics are far better than anywhere else and the price point is lower than other providers."
