Implementing a database cluster is a tedious task and managing the cluster is adding an additional work overhead to the day to day operations. Now you have the luxury to more focus on your code while running your Mongo Database cluster on cloud in minutes. I recently, got a chance to work with Mongo Atlas Cloud, and thought to write an article for my fellow readers.
Mongo Database is a document based database with bringing scalability and flexibility to your application. It stores data in JSON like documents, which allows you to change the fields in each and every document. Document structure can be changed over time with the growth of your data. Mongo Atlas is the cloud based database cluster solution which can easily deploy in major cloud service providers. You can try it out in the free tier of these cloud platforms, and follow my article to getting started with Mongo Atlas Cloud.
The good thing about Mongo Atlas Cloud is you can directly start its free tier without a credit card. Just signed up for a free account with my details.
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You can select the path of the cluster, and directly start the cluster deployment. For my testing purposes I stayed with the free tier.
You have most renowned public cloud providers to spin up the cluster, I choose AWS as my Cloud provider, and Northern Virginia as the region. You can easily identify the regions, which are available to run the cluster with free tier.
Select the “M0 Sandbox” as the Cluster Tier, Version and a relevant name for the cluster. Then create the cluster.
To see what are the limitations of Mongo Atlas refer this explained article.
Allow few minutes to spin up the Mongo Atlas Cluster. I could see a clear nice checklist to complete the cluster creation. It doesn’t necessarily needs an expert to set this up. It will walk you through the steps.
Once the cluster is ready, you can connect to the cluster with few options. You can view these options, with “CONNECT” button.
Before you connect, you might need to whitelist your IP address, by default all the IP addresses are blocked for the sake of security.
Add the local IP address to allow the connection, if there are more IPs you can add them later.
Create a User to access the database
Then you can select the connection method to access the cluster
I chose mongo shell as the connection method
There are options to download the shell according to the Operating system you use, and also the commands you can use to connect.
So I copied the download URL, and extracted the zip file on my ubuntu machine
Once it successfully installed, “mongo” command should be working and version should be returned of the shell
Copy the Connection URL in the Atlas window, paste and hit return to start the connection, You’ll be redirected to enter the password. After the successful authentication, you’ll be connected to the Mongo Atlas Cluster.
Network connection whitelisting and VPC peering settings can be managed under network access
For the testing purposes, it has an option to load some dummy data in to the cluster and you can have a clear visibility of the Mongo Cluster
Documents can be easily managed and necessary actions can be performed in the same console
Cluster monitoring details can be seen in a simple interactive dashboard
All the activities will be recorded in the “Activity Feed“
Some advanced settings such as “Cluster Data SpecificStatistics, Real Time Performance Monitoring, Performance Advisor and Profiler, etc” can be configured under settings
One other important thing is, Mongo Atlas allows to connect to many application integrations and those applications can be visible in the “Integrations” tab
This is just a high level overview of the Mongo Atlas Cloud and you can build your free Mongo Cluster on AWS, Azure or GCP. I encourage you to give it a try.
