Video Transcript (English)

After learning about MongoDB Atlas, you probably can’t wait to try it for yourself, so let’s jump in!

In this lesson, we’ll walk you through how to deploy your first Atlas cluster.

To begin, if you don’t already have an Atlas account, you can select the Try Free button at the top of the MongoDB homepage.

Then, fill out the form with the necessary information. You will use your email to sign up, or, if you’re a student, you can join the GitHub Student pack and sign up using your GitHub account for special benefits. You can learn more by going to mongodb.com-slash-students.

Once you fill out the form, and you sign in for the first time, you will be directed to answer a few questions. The answers to these questions will direct you to useful resources for your specific use case. I'm going to fill it out based on our purposes today, which is to learn.

Okay, now that our account is created we're prompted to deploy our first cluster!

We have several options for quickly creating an Atlas cluster, but we can also use the advanced configuration to make other selections if we need to.

M10 is the first of the dedicated cluster tiers. Dedicated clusters are equipped to handle large datasets. This class of cluster is what we recommend for production deployments, specifically M30 or higher for high traffic applications. Only dedicated clusters can be sharded and deployed in multiple regions across multiple cloud providers.

The serverless tier is great for testing and workloads with variable traffic patterns as it operates on a “pay for what you use” model.

M0 is perfect for our purposes. As you can see, it is a free and shared tier. It allows us to load sample data and experiment with functionality. It is possible to upgrade an M0 cluster to a serverless or dedicated tier at any time if needed. Let's select M0.

Note that you can only have one free shared cluster per project. If you want more you have to select a higher cluster tier. More on that in a moment.

Now we need to name our cluster! Since this is our first cluster, we can just leave it at the default Cluster0. However, you cannot change it once created, so make sure the name is descriptive of its purpose.

Next, we'll enable automatic security setup. This is helpful because it will add your current IP address to the cluster for you and make the process of connecting to your cluster easier.

We'll skip pre-loading the sample dataset for now so we can download a full set of sample data later.

Next we need to select our cloud provider and region. Because we selected a shared cluster, our region choices are limited. To optimize our deployment, Atlas has pre-selected recommended options for provider and region based on our current location. Let’s use those preselected options.

Okay, we’re ready now to deploy our cluster!

We select “Create Deployment” which redirects us to the Connect to Cluster popup window. This is where Atlas connects to our IP address.

With our IP address automatically connected, we are prompted to create a database user and connect to our cluster. Note that this is a different user from your Atlas Account.

Atlas has a username and password auto generated for us. Be sure to copy this info and save it for later as you will not be able to retrieve it again. We will go with what is provided and select Create Database User.

Next, we are prompted to connect to our database. We'll cover connecting to our database in an upcoming unit. For now, we'll explore our data in Atlas, so we can skip this step by closing this window.

We are now on the Project Overview page and we see our cluster is being created. This can take a few minutes.

Once it is built you will see options presented to help manage it. We will come back to these later. For now, I want to bring your attention to the top left corner. You can see our organization name and Project name with drop down menus. Let’s go ahead and look at our organization from a high level.

Organizations allow you to group and define users and teams, and grant them access to projects.

Projects allow you to define and organize resources like database clusters. One common way to use this feature is to create separate projects for development, testing, and production.

Our first organization is named for us already based on the name we signed up with. I want to go ahead and change this so it describes what this organization is for. To do so, we go to Settings.

On the settings page we can make a few changes to enhance the security of our organization as well as make changes to its profile. For now, let’s just change our organization name. A window opens up to edit the name, let’s make it “Intro to MongoDB: Testing” as that describes its overall purpose.

Let’s check on our cluster by going back to our Projects.

We are now brought back to the Project Overview page. Here we can load some sample data and start playing with the features of Atlas.

This is where we will start in the next lesson!

Before moving on, let’s recap what you learned.

In this video, you learned how to deploy an Atlas cluster. You also learned about the available options available depending on the type of cluster, and the use cases they serve.

You also learned how to create database users and securely deploy your cluster.

Alright, let’s begin exploring!