OEM & Open Source Offerings

A detailed overview of the MongoDB Atlas Service now being offered by IBM

The IBM MongoDB Strategic Partnership Strikes Again!!!   MongoDB Atlas is now an offered addition to the IBM MongoDB portfolio.

High performing IT teams with continuous delivery practices, automation, open source and cloud database services, increase productivity and enables faster feedback cycles, allowing more time to be spent on market-differentiating solutions. In addition, they improve software quality and security, and decrease time spent on rework, and security issues.

In 2018, IBM delivered the IBM Data Management Platform for MongoDB database, an advanced document database for on-premises deployment. Currently, there are many joint customers of IBM and MongoDB. In 2019 IBM Delivered a zDbaaS service for MongoDB Enterprise Advanced leveraging hyper-secure IBM mainframe environments. And earlier in 2020, for hybrid customers wanting a Kubernetes based MongoDB Enterprise Managed cloud service, IBM as a cloud provider, offered that as well.   

While I’ll get to further detail on the Atlas service, perhaps the most interesting discussion is on use cases that MongoDB, the world’s most popular NoSQL database and JSON document store, is great for. 

• New IT Models.  Providing a sandbox for to develop and connect applications quicker. An example of this is the development and implementation of a new point of sale application for a new product set.  
• Mobile.  Extending data access and value to mobile applications
• Smart Objects.  Collecting and managing IOT data
• Expanded use cases such as AI and Watson. Extending existing applications with less and integration of non-structured data. Using a more complete data set helps drive better data driven decisions, improving customer service, processes, mitigating risk and fraud. 

MongoDB Atlas Managed Services : Atlas is meant to focus development and delivery teams away from the complex DBA and Production support tasks real-time databases usually require like:

• Provisioning servers
• Configuring high availability 
• Securing access
• Backup and recovery
• Monitoring and alerting
• Upgrades and maintenance

Besides handling the above, the MongoDB Atlas Managed Service provides the following attributes:

• Self-service querying and Elastic
• Global and Cloud agnostic
• Enterprise-grade security and SLA’s
• Comprehensive monitoring
• Managed Backups
• Application Development help

Pricing of the MongoDB Atlas Service with credits

Prepaid credits are a pool of currency that you can apply to cover your usage of MongoDB Atlas. Credit amounts sold are based on an estimation of your annualized usage of the database service —Credits are stored in an Atlas account and applied until they are exhausted or expire. So how are credits consumed? The rate at which credits are consumed is based on 3 factors:

1. Cluster configuration. Priced at an hourly cost associated with instance size, storage, speed, and storage capacity.
2. Fully managed backup and network transfer. Costs depend on the size of backup snapshots, and backup schedule.
3. Network transfer. Pass-through costs from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, or the Google Cloud platform.

There are 3 Atlas Configurations.  Pro, Enterprise, and Platinum with varying SLA’s and software included for you to start at the lowest cost possible and grow as your application requires.  These configurations can be set up worldwide by your choice enabling closer to customer data plus meeting your high availability and possible legal requirements.

I’ll now get into a deeper dive on key capabilities and deployment characteristics of the MongoDB Atlas Managed Service:

For the administrator.

High Availability.  A minimum of three data nodes per replica set are automatically deployed across zones for high availability.  

Global Clusters.  Distribute your fully automated database with MongoDB Atlas clusters across multiple geographically distributed zones made up of one or more cloud regions.  Read and write locally to provide single-digit millisecond latency for your distributed applications.

Fine-grained monitoring.   Create dashboards from dozens of throughput, performance, and utilization metrics to analyze historical database performance.  Add and customize notifications when database operations, server usage, or other conditions reach defined thresholds to suit your workloads.  Get alerts over email, text, and other channels you already use.

Cross-region Replication. Ensure uptime in the unlikely event of a multi-zone or total region outage.  Get improved performance for local reads by geographically distributing read-only replica set members that do not participate in the failover process.  

Performance Advisor.  Receive intelligent, automated recommendations to improve your cluster performance.  Index and schema suggestions are generated based on automated analysis of cluster metadata and logs.  

Specifically targeting developers.

Data Explorer.  Run queries and interact with your data with full CRUD functionality, manage indexes and view index usage statistics and review schema suggestions.  Build and test sample aggregation pipelines while creating and managing search indexes.

Aggregation Builder.  Choose from dozens of MongoDB aggregation stages and over 100 operators.  Drag-and-drop stages to test and apply changes quickly.  See sample document results to verify transformations and aggregations at each stage.

Atlas Search.  Simple to use.  Create a search index on your collections in a few No need to export data to a 3rd party or manage a separate search platform.  

And for Db performance.  

High Performance.  WiredTiger storage engine with compression and fine-grained concurrency control helps meet the most demanding SLAs.    Automated scaling for storage is enabled by default, making it easier for you to manage capacity.  MongoDB Atlas supports automated sharding, giving you the ability to scale up or out with minimal impact to your app.  Workload isolation across replica sets help to concurrently run operational and analytical workloads across the same database, without any resource contention.

Workload Isolation.  Workload isolation is a key benefit of replica sets in Atlas.  Enhance database performance by designating read-only nodes within replica sets.  Eliminate interference and resource contention between operational and analytical queries on the same database.  Use analytics nodes to handle analytical workloads, such as IBM Cognos visualizations or MongoDB BI Connector queries.

And to assure secure access and uptime

Backups.  MongoDB Atlas continuously backs up your data, ensuring your backups are typically just a few seconds behind the operational system.  Point-in-time backup of replica sets and consistent, cluster-wide snapshots of shard clusters. With MongoDB Atlas, you can easily and safely restore to precisely the moment you  with backups securely stored in North America, Ireland, Germany, United Kingdom, or Australia*.

Security.   Networks are closed off to the outside world by default.  IP addresses must be a whitelist entry for inbound network traffic.  Encryption of data in flight — TLS / SSL used for all network traffic.   Encryption of data at rest — encrypted storage volumes.  Peer the VPC containing your MongoDB Atlas clusters to the VPCs containing your application servers to connect over a private network.

Other secure access capabilities include - Simplify user management by grouping users into teams. All users in a team share the same project access. Users can belong to multiple teams.  Auditing support tracks DDL, DML, and DCL commands.  Your LDAP processes and servers can be used to manage access.  Integrate with your key management service of choice (Amazon AWS KMS, Microsoft Azure Key Vault, Google Cloud KMS), allowing you to centralize control of the keys used to encrypt your MongoDB data.

Startup fast

And if you are worried about startup time – Live Migration simplifies and speeds you to your goal.  Migrate existing deployments running anywhere into MongoDB Atlas with minimal impact to your application. Live migration works by syncing your source database and a target database hosted in MongoDB Atlas. 

Finally, Mongo Atlas will take care of most of your database operations, but there are some things that you control:

• Schema design
• Query and index optimization
• Server size selection – you select the appropriate size of the server, coupled with disk IOPs and storage capacity
• Capacity planning - you determine when you need additional capacity, typically using the monitoring telemetry provided by MongoDB Atlas, but you can make these changes with no downtime
• Initiating database restores

With the flexibility of MongoDB Atlas, you can of course change your mind on the server speed, storage capacity, size of the replica set, sharding, etc.  We also encourage you to engage with IBM Services for your needs deploying or running MongoDB.

Learn more about IBM and Mongo DB https://www.ibm.com/products/mongodb-enterprise-advanced