September 2016 Summaries

Serverless architectures are a natural extension of microservices, breaking down functionality into finer-grained components that run as isolated, autonomous functions in a stateless compute service. They provide elastic scalability, rapid development and iteration, less system administration, and improved developer productivity. Serverless computing frees developers from traditional infrastructure costs by automatically provisioning servers, maintaining infrastructure, upgrading software, and only charging for consumed resources. MongoDB Atlas is well-suited for serverless architectures, providing elastic scalability, flexible schema, vendor independence, and robust security controls. However, there are many considerations to keep in mind when implementing a serverless architecture, including the need for diligent planning and careful evaluation of database requirements.

AWS provides an incredibly popular environment for running MongoDB deployments, offering many choices about instance type, storage, network config, security, and more. To maximize performance on AWS, it's essential to consider several critical factors including Storage/Disk, Networking, Instance Size (Memory and CPU). Fast storage is crucial, with Elastic Block Store (EBS) or Instance Store being recommended options. Provisioning IOPS and using EBS-optimized instance types can improve performance by minimizing contention from other traffic. Dedicated 3 separate volumes for MongoDB, each with their own assigned IOPS, can provide an increase in performance by reducing I/O contention. Throughput is also important, with maximums of 320 MiB/s per volume or 800 MiB/s per instance. Using EC2's instance store as storage layer can be beneficial, but requires careful configuration and pre-heating the store before production use. RAID configurations can improve performance and durability, with RAID 10 being a preferred option for I/O-intensive applications. Networking is also critical, with Amazon's Enhanced Networking feature providing significantly improved performance and consistency. Configuring Amazon VPCs for MongoDB can provide enhanced security features like security groups and access control lists. Choosing the right instance type is essential, with erring on the side of going larger and then scaling down as needed. Running a single mongod process per instance is recommended to eliminate potential resource contention. Following the MongoDB Production Notes can boost performance, while using MongoDB Cloud Manager for monitoring and management can ensure successful deployment.

Developers can easily integrate MongoDB Atlas into their applications using various programming languages and frameworks, taking advantage of high availability and scaling features without operational overhead. MongoDB Atlas provides security features, built-in replication, backups, fine-grained monitoring, automated patching, and one-click upgrades, as well as a choice of cloud providers and billing options. The platform is accessible through a GUI or via connection strings/URIs specific to the chosen framework, allowing developers to focus on their applications rather than database management. With MongoDB Atlas, users can prepare their application, connect it to the platform, add test data, explore the data, modify documents, and verify updates, making it easy to migrate existing data to the platform or build new applications with it.