Video Transcript (English)

Welcome back! Now that you have a grasp of MongoDB’s architecture, it’s time to shift our focus to MongoDB Atlas, our database-as-a-service that you’ll be working with throughout this course.

You may already be familiar with Atlas and some of the exciting features that make its a powerful data platform. If you want to learn more about these features, be sure to check out our documentation.

In this video, we’ll dive a little deeper into the Atlas infrastructure and how it operates on the cloud, enabling you to securely and seamlessly manage your data.

First, we’ll cover what makes Atlas, MongoDB's database as a service offering, different from MongoDB’s self-hosted options.

Then we'll talk about Atlas’s cloud infrastructure and how it enhances availability and reduces latency.

Finally, we'll briefly go over the security features available on Atlas to keep your data safe in the cloud.

Before we get into Atlas, let's talk about MongoDB's self-managed options. MongoDB offers two self-managed database options, MongoDB Community Edition and MongoDB Enterprise Advanced.

For both options, users download MongoDB software, and install it on nodes that they either own or rent. Then, users must configure the database and infrastructure by completing deployment and management tasks. Both self-hosted options allow teams a great deal of control over the database.

Self-managed is not the only option. Instead of deploying, maintaining, and troubleshooting your own database infrastructure, you can use those resources to focus on your main application with MongoDB Atlas.

With infrastructure based in the cloud, MongoDB Atlas’s primary purpose is to remove nearly all the operational overhead that comes with running MongoDB yourself.

Since MongoDB Atlas is a fully managed database platform, it provides support across the whole development lifecycle, automating processes like database distribution and upgrades.

Atlas runs on all three major cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. It is even possible to deploy a cluster across multiple providers to enhance fault tolerance and avoid vendor lock-in.

After choosing your cloud provider or providers, you can select your preferred region, which corresponds to the location of the data center where your MongoDB cluster will be deployed. The choice of region can impact the latency of requests, data regulations, and prices.

These regions also contain multiple availability zones. Availability zones are isolated locations within a cloud provider's data center region. They are crucial in ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.

Atlas allows you to deploy clusters across multiple regions and availability zones. These multi-region clusters help mitigate risks associated with regional outages. They also enable global distribution of data, which reduces latency and allows data to be accessed in its country of origin to ensure compliance with data sovereignty laws.

By distributing clusters across multiple regions and zones, Atlas enables automatic failover. This means that if one zone experiences a failure or disruption, the other zone can continue to serve read and write requests.

Because our data is on the cloud, we need to think about security.

Atlas makes authentication and authorization a default requirement. For authentication, Atlas supports multi-factor authentication (MFA) with various options.

For authorization, Atlas uses Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). This means you're required to create specific roles for users, so they only have access to the data they need.

Atlas also provides several layers of security measures and controls to ensure data privacy.

These security measures satisfy regulatory certifications such as HIPAA, GDPR, SOC2 Type II, and many more.

Another security measure MongoDB Atlas employs is network isolation, which restricts access to Atlas clusters. This ensures that only authorized clients and services can communicate with your database. For example, Atlas automatically creates deployments within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with dedicated firewalls. You can configure an IP Access List, which grants network access to only certain IPs.

Next, Atlas provides encryption by default along with several customizable options. There are many features which ensure your data is encrypted when it's traveling across the network, encrypted at rest when it's stored, and encrypted when it's in use and actively being queried. To learn more about these features, check out our unit on security.

Beyond its native security layers, Atlas supports auditing to track and record operations, private endpoints to connect to clusters off a public network, and integration with third-party monitoring solutions to provide visibility into database activity.

Now that we know our data will be safe and secure, we can confidently deploy our first Atlas cluster.

But first, let’s recap what you learned in this lesson.

First, you learned that MongoDB Atlas is a Database as a Service, offering a fully managed database solution on the cloud.

We discovered how Atlas’s cloud infrastructure ensures automatic failover across regions and availability zones.

Then, we explored how Atlas keeps our data secure, offering authentication, and access control along with native security features such as network isolation, encryption of data at every stage.

Alright, let's get our heads out of the cloud for a few minutes and deploy our first cluster.