MongoDB Inc. has equipped its Atlas managed database service with a new capability that will enable customers to distribute a single database environment across multiple public clouds.

It supports Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Google Cloud on launch.

The multicloud cluster support, announced today, comes in a time when a growing number of enterprises are adopting a multicloud approach with their information technology strategy. Other players in the data management and analytics market are also adjusting their product portfolios to address the trend.

MongoDB Atlas is a cloud version of MongoDB’s namesake database, which ranks as the industry’s most popular NoSQL system by downloads. MongoDB is favored by developers because it’s relatively simple to use and can store many different types of information. It also has a sizable enterprise installed base from which MongoDB generated revenues of $138.3 million last quarter. 

It was theoretically already possible to create a multicloud MongoDB environment before today’s Atlas update. In practice, however, the task can be difficult to the point of being prohibitive because of the complexity of securely sharing data between different platforms. With MongoDB Atlas, the company is now promising to make multicloud deployments a reality for enterprises.

There are several situations where such a setup can be useful. One is if an enterprise runs its main database on one cloud but wishes to use a certain feature or product that’s only available from a rival. Disaster recovery is another use case: Enterprises can distribute a MongoDB Atlas cluster across multiple providers’ data centers so that if one goes down, the database is still operational.

Not least of the benefits MongoDB touts is flexibility. Companies’ information technology requirements change over time and so do the feature sets of the major public clouds, which means there’s a possibility an organization may wish to change platforms in the future. MongoDB Atlas’ ability to automatically deploy a database cluster across multiple clouds can make this task easier. 

“Customers can build, deploy and run powerful, highly available applications across different cloud providers, giving them unprecedented flexibility on where they can deploy applications, and what services they can leverage from our cloud infrastructure partners,” MongoDB Chief Executive Officer Dev Ittycheria said in a statement.

MongoDB Atlas’ new multicloud feature also provides certain benefits for the company itself. The service in certain ways competes with the native managed NoSQL databases offered by the cloud providers on whose infrastructure it runs. By enabling enterprises to deploy its service across multiple platforms, MongoDB can provide a capability that sets the offering apart from the cloud providers’ own solutions.   

MongoDB says that MongoDB Atlas is used by more than 18,800 customers. The service is a big contributor to the company’s revenue growth, logging year-over-year growth of 66% in the second  quarter.

Photo: MongoDB