MongoDB Inc. has a new plan for monetizing cloud-based deployments of its free document store. At a customer event in New York today, the company unveiled a managed service called Atlas that promises to help users to automate the administration of their off-premise database clusters for an affordable hourly rate.

It’s a successor to MongoDB Cloud Manager, a monitoring tool that originally rolled out in 2011 and was relaunched as a management automation engine a few years later. All of its core features have been carried over to Atlas. The service provides the ability to quickly allocate cloud resources for a deployment using a streamlined “one-click provisioning” mechanism, and then have the database automatically set up based on predefined rules. Users can customize most of everything from the system’s sharding settings to the number of backups that are kept on hand.

Atlas creates a minimum of three copies during the setup process and distributes them across multiple cloud data centers to protect against localized outages. Moreover, it can also resolve cluster-specific availability issues thanks to an auto-recovery function that immediately springs into action when a MongoDB instance malfunctions. And as if that wasn’t enough, the service takes care of backup, patching and several other related maintenance tasks as well. As a result, developers have more time to spend on coding, which means that they’re able to deliver software faster.

Atlas attempts to address MongoDB’s enterprise user base too with an expansive set of security and access control features. Organizations can configure their deployments to accept requests only from authorized applications, restrict user activity based on role and encrypt data in every stage of processing. The service is available on Amazon Web Services immediately, with support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Engine set to follow suit in the foreseeable future. MongoDB sees the multi-provider integration being particularly appealing to the roughly 30 percent of its users who run database deployments on more than one infrastructure-as-a-service platform. 

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