MongoDB Atlas Is Awesome

MongoDB is really fast and easy to get setup with, and therefore is a favorite for many developers who want to get a running start into their new application. However, because of this, many developers don’t take the time to set up replica sets (that provide high availability (HA) and automatic failover) or role based access control (RBAC). For local development, this might not be necessary, but when working in a team environment, or whenever you have a publicly accessible MongoDB instance, these should be required. And there really is no excuse to NOT have it.

Atlas is a service by the creators of MongoDB that provisions and creates a MongoDB cluster with a replica set, users with RBAC and encryption at the click of a button for free. It also provides metrics and alerts for your cluster. Now the free tier only gets you 512 MB of storage, but this should be plenty for your development environment. Once you get to production, upgrade that same cluster to handle the load of your production application. You might decide to setup your own production environment in order to avoid the premium cost, but for the rapidly working developer, the free tier is amazing.

I just recently discovered Atlas, and I will never waste my time trying to setup my own development environment again. So far it has “just worked”, and when trying to develop quickly, that goes a long way.

Written by James Quigley, an SRE/DevOps Engineer, and general tech nerd. Views and opinions are my own. Check out my YouTube Channel or follow me on Twitter!