Developing applications is challenging due to various common problems that need to be solved, such as user authentication, database management, and hosting. MongoDB Atlas is a hosted cloud database service that can help developers build their applications quickly and handle many of these common problems by providing a suite of products that manage infrastructure and allow developers to focus on application development. MongoDB Atlas allows users to set up MongoDB clusters, which are document-based NoSQL databases that store information in JSON-like documents with limited relational capabilities. The service also provides additional features such as user authentication, serverless function runtime, API gateway, and device data syncing through the App Service layer. With MongoDB Atlas, developers can integrate various services like Vonage communications APIs to build their applications more efficiently.