MongoDB Launches Atlas Cloud Database As A Service

MongoDB has launched a new product that can deliver the company’s database services wholly through the cloud on pay-per-hour basis.

MongoDB Atlas was unveiled at the company’s annual MongoDB World conference in New York City, and will be available to customers through cloud provider Amazon Web Services initially, with support for Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud providers soon.

“MongoDB Atlas takes everything we know about operating MongoDB and packages it into a convenient, elastic, on-demand service,” said Dev Ittycheria, president and CEO of MongoDB.

“This release is yet another major milestone in building the best database for modern applications, and providing expansive options for how customers consume the technology – in their own data centres, in the cloud, and now as a service.”

Customers also won’t be locked in to cloud providers, unlike Database as a Service products from public cloud providers like Google and Amazon.

Big Deal

MongoDB’s vice president of strategy, Kelly Stirman, told TechWeekEurope that Atlas is a “big deal” for MongoDB.

“Now we have a full service that essentially takes care of running the whole database for you. You pay by the hour for exactly how much you use,” he said.

“You can choose which cloud platform you want to run on, you’re never locked in to one cloud provider or another.

“There were some companies who were doing it before and that are doing it today, but we have not done this before. It’s a new thing for us, it’s a big deal.”

Atlas has been tested out on a couple of thousand early access customers over the last six weeks, and Stirman said that the service will be particularly enticing to developers who spend their days dreaming of their next projects.

“If you’re a developer, the thing that stands in your way is the deployment, it’s the infrastructure, it’s the management. We remove that friction point [with Atlas],” said Stirman.

But MongoDB also want to target larger enterprises with Atlas, who might want to use the service to host their testing or development environments with fully-managed infrastructure, while keeping production on-premise.

“I think people are going to be using it all over the place, and the analogy I’ve been using is that Atlas is like Uber, in the transportation analogy,” said Stirman.

mLab?

MongoDB Database as a service features are already available through mLab, formerly MongoLab, a cloud database provider that hosts MongoDB databases, but now it seems MongoDB wants to take the cloud reigns for itself.

Matt Aslett, analyst at 451 Research, told TechWeekEurope: “The launch of MongoDB Atlas has to be seen as the continuation of the company’s attempts to generate revenue with products and services that complement the free and open source version.

“However, the launch of MongoDB Atlas also means that the company will be competing with existing MongoDB hosting and cloud providers – notably mLab, Rackspace’s ObjectRocket and IBM’s Compose, which have previously been close partners.”

But MongoDB could have some tough competition with the likes of those mentioned above. “MLab, ObjectRocket and Compose have all expanded their own offerings in recent years to move beyond simply offering MongoDB-as-a-service,” said Aslett.

Pricing

The cloud market is competitive and dynamic, and MongoDB claims to have priced Atlas accordingly. Atlas instances start at $0.008 per hour for 2GB of memory and 10GB of storage, and stretch up to $3.32 per hour for 160GB of memory and a terabyte of storage.

“Just like anything you can buy by the hour, if you bought a whole year it’s going to be more expensive,” said Stirman.

“If you look at the hourly pricing, for a highly available, secure, high performance service it’s less than a cup of coffee per hour.”

“We’re very confident in the service. It’s a new service from us, but we’re using things that are well established,” he added.

At launch, Atlas is available in EMEA, North America, and AsiaPac.

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