MongoDB emits free-tier DBaaS and migration service to woo devs

MongoDB has announced a free tier for its DBaaS offering Atlas, as it continues to sound out the incumbents' customers who might be looking to save a bit of money.

Founded as 10gen in New York City back in 2007, the business behind the document-oriented database has pushed a lot of resources towards evangelism, as most open-source companies need to do, and of late on music videos luring in the punters.

MongoDB Atlas is the company's DBaaS offering, giving customers an opportunity to run an instance in the cloud which they needn't bother wiht the hassle of managing themselves.

Until now, Atlas was sold from between $0.12 to $12.87 per hour, but its free cluster comes with 512 MB of storage, which probably isn't enough for a production case, although there are no SLAs preventing an extraordinarily enterprising party from giving that a go.

Much as with very much not open-source market leader Oracle whom CEO Dev Ittycheria is intent on seeing MongoDB displace, the ability to offer customers a range of deployments is considered key to fuelling the sales pipeline.

Mat Keep, Mongo's director of product and market analysis, told The Register the free offering was a “great opportunity for developers who haven't looked at alternatives to the traditional relational database design,” to have a go on NoSQL MongoDB, “and with an instance that's managed by us.”

The free Atlas release is also being accompanied by a utility which will support the live migration of on- or off-premises data to Atlas. Dubbed MongoMirror, the migration utility will work with any pre-existing MongoDB replica set running v3.0 or higher.

MongoDB hope the free free utility will contribute to the growth of Atlas, which was launched in June of last year and counts eHarmony and Thermo Fisher Scientific among its customers.

It is considered a strategic part of Mongo's business, with decent margins according to Keep, although offering customers' flexibility in deployment is key to the open-source company's revenue plans, and is available on AWS, Google's Cloud Platform, and on Azure – despite Microsoft being a little cheeky regarding MongoDB's well-publicised security SNAFUs.

Keep reckoned what distinguishes Atlas from offerings like AWS' DynamoDB and GCP's Spanner is its ability to offer users platform indpenedent. “Our approach allows you to take advantage of price economics in compute and storage, without the lock-in,” he told The Register. ®