News

MongoDB Service Ties into AWS

• By David Ramel
• 11/02/2016

MongoDB Atlas, which provides hosted MongoDB as a Service, is being updated with closer ties to the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud, enabling data developers to create safer private networks hooking into cloud services.

Specifically -- as part of a new MongoDB 3.4 release announced yesterday -- MongoDB Atlas now offers AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering.

"Using MongoDB Atlas, an elastic, on-demand cloud database as a service, organizations can quickly spin up and evaluate the new features in MongoDB 3.4," the company said in a statement yesterday. "In addition, support for AWS VPC peering is being added, enabling users to create an extended, private network that connects their application servers and services such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS Lambda to their MongoDB Atlas databases without using public IP addresses that could compromise security."

MongoDB Atlas "What's New" documentation provides more details about the new functionality.

"Each MongoDB Atlas group is provisioned into its own AWS VPC, thus isolating the customer’s data and underlying systems from other MongoDB Atlas users," it says. "With the addition of VPC peering, customers can now connect their application servers deployed to another AWS VPC directly to their MongoDB Atlas cluster using private IP addresses."

The release notes also explain more about the increased security that the AWS VPC peering provides by obviating the need for public IP communications.

"Whitelisting public IP addresses is not required for servers accessing MongoDB Atlas from a peered VPC," the details note. "Services such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk or AWS Lambda that use non-deterministic IP addresses can also be connected to MongoDB Atlas without having to open up wide public IP ranges that could compromise security. VPC peering allows users to create an extended, private network connecting their application servers and back-end databases."

The 3.4 version of MongoDB, one of the more popular NoSQL databases, will be generally available early next month, the company said. According to an FAQ, MongoDB Atlas is initially available in the following AWS regions that sport at least three availability zones: us-east-1 (N. Virginia); us-west-2 (Oregon); eu-west-1 (Dublin); and ap-southeast-2 (Sydney). The company said more regions and public cloud providers will be added in the future.