Data development platforms have become integral to how society functions today. We see the usage of DDP across various industries to analyze data, manage content, map out decisions and outcomes, and deploy applications in real time. It’s expected to use platforms like this in app development, but it also sees usage in major data-driven entities such as e-commerce and healthcare.

Data has become increasingly complex, with customization and scaling becoming more essential than ever. One only needs to look at the amount of data created, copied, captured, and consumed at any given moment. Forecasts from Statista even show that this will hit 181 zettabytes globally by 2025.

MongoDB Atlas is one of the top-ranked DaaS data development platforms you can use today. Its popularity can largely be attributed to how easy it is to use. Learn how to do so with some handy instructions below.

When to Use MongoDB Atlas

Serverless computing and low-code development are often related to each other in modern-day tech. Experts from the Forbes Technology Council attribute the popularity of both because of their scalability, cost-efficiency, and flexibility when combined. This only adds to the popularity of MongoDB Atlas as a DDP.

Because it’s built for and by developers, you can expect a data model that isn’t hard to master with whatever programming language you are most comfortable with. In turn, it’s often used as part of the MEAN stack for web applications.

MongoDB Atlas’ managed DDP is meant to combat the fracture of infrastructure and development teams, so you get a scalable environment where everyone can manage different projects and simultaneous data at the same time. It also allows you to land, store, and index data without having to introduce schema designs.

The platform mostly touts itself as an innovative AI workload tool, so you can potentially use it for generative AI, complex AI-driven decision-making, and feature stores for machine learning models. A survey by Altman Solon shows that software development will be seeing 80% adoption rates for generative AI, with other industries like marketing and customer service closely following.

How to Set Up Your MongoDB Data Development Platform

You can choose a graphical interface or a command line interface to interact with Atlas. The exact method to do this will depend largely on whether you use Atlas CLI or Atlas UI.

To officially get started, you must first create an account with MongoDB. After signing up with an email account of your choice you can create your first database for free. Command line users will have to install Atlas CLI, which can be installed through binary, Chocolatey, Apt, Yum, or Homebrew.

Set Up and Use with Atlas UI

The first thing to do is to create and deploy your first cluster, which will work as your data development environment. In Database Deployments, you must add trusted IP addresses by clicking Connect to the server instance of your choice. From there, choose ‘Add Your Current IP Address’ and add any trusted addresses here.

Now that you’ve secured the cluster, you must create a database user. This just ensures that only authorized users can access your clusters. Only those with Owner tags can create new database users, but this should automatically be your designation if you created the cluster. Set up a username and password for your user and then just click ‘Create Database User’.

Now, you can connect to your cluster! You will need to install MongoDB Shell. You can also choose the PyMongo or Node.js driver if you need programming language integrations. If you want to have a visual environment for data aggregation and querying, you can also go for MongoDB Compass.

Once you’ve got the necessary drivers, you can now start inserting documents, loading data, and generally interacting with your data sets.

Set Up and Use with Atlas CLI

The first command you’ll need to run in the terminal is atlas setup. Then, enter Y to open a browser window where you can log in to your account. Verify your session by copying the code from Atlas CLI to your browser. Click ‘Confirm Authorization’, then you can go back to your terminal.

At this point, the setup command show have created an M0 cluster. A prompt will also come up asking you if you want to set up a free database. If you enter Y, then you can create your cluster and it will have default settings. You may change your database credentials and cloud provider accordingly. Saying yes here is also a good option if you want your IP address to automatically be authorized.

If you don’t want to get the default settings, you will have to instead run the command atlas quickstart. This requires you to configure your first cluster and assign trusted IP addresses manually. You can authenticate using atlas auth login or atlas config init. From there, you can connect to your cluster using CLI commands depending on the configuration you use.

Final Thoughts

If you want some added security for your data development platform, you may also want to make use of MongoDB Data, which is basically a MongoDB backup tool that helps shield your data from public access, restricts communication, and prevent holes that can be manipulated by hackers, among other things.

Once you’ve got all that covered, you can freely experiment and see how best to use Atlas to fit your needs.