MongoDB has evolved into the database solution of choice for developers looking to build efficient, scalable applications in the cloud. But, as when using any cloud-based infrastructure, using MongoDB introduces an additional layer of complexity to customers’ IT spend.
This week, we announced support for MongoDB on the CloudZero Platform. With this new functionality, customers can gain visibility into their MongoDB spend, combine it with any other spend that contributes to their bottom line, and get a complete view of business dimensions such as products and customers.
Here’s what makes MongoDB so powerful, why its billing data can be challenging to handle, and how CloudZero’s new automated billing connection can help.
Data: A Love Story
The SaaS revolution has centered on data. Companies win when they can ingest an enormous amount of data and use it to make more informed strategic decisions.
The rise of data as strategic gold has been exponential: Ten years ago, you could afford to make your database a secondary concern. Now, if you don’t have a database solution that pulls in lots of data, organizes it, retrieves it quickly, and scales flexibly from day one, you jeopardize your competitiveness.
The world’s absolute largest companies build their own databases. But if you fall outside of this rarefied category, you don’t have the resources to do the same. Plus, choosing a lower-quality database solution — one not offered by a vendor who specializes exclusively in databases — may endanger your product integrity.
Enter MongoDB. First launched in 2009, MongoDB is a document-based, fully distributed, cloud-friendly database solution, much sought-after by engineers. The introduction of MongoDB Atlas in 2016 signaled a shift to the database-as-a-service age: Customers could now use MongoDB the way they use any other cloud service.
Great news for getting higher-quality products out the door faster. But for easily assessing and managing your costs? Not quite so simple.
MongoDB Billing Complexity
Breaking down your cloud bill is never simple. The bills themselves can run to hundreds of billions of lines. And while most cloud providers have some native tooling for making sense of that data mass, they run into obstacles (shared resources, Kubernetes, tagging) that leave certain stones unturned.
It’s hard enough when you’re only using one of the major cloud providers. But when you add in a more specialized cloud infrastructure vendor like MongoDB, it gets even trickier.
Companies use MongoDB in a variety of ways. Some use it primarily for internal purposes, like research and data analysis. Others use it as part of external-facing applications, whose costs should be reflected in their margin and COGS. Many use it for both, meaning they incur multiple different types of costs.
MongoDB’s billing model is consumption-based. So, developers can access resources on-demand, and their companies pay for what they use. Without a dedicated solution for allocating their MongoDB spend by business units, MongoDB users get a lump-sum bill that they have to analyze manually.
How CloudZero Makes MongoDB Billing Simple
CloudZero recently introduced an adapter that lets companies unify their MongoDB spend with the rest of their cloud spend. In addition to automating the process of ingesting and analyzing their MongoDB bill, this gives customers:
- Guardrails. We provide up-to-the-minute cost data, including anomaly alerts and trends, empowering engineers to innovate with a safety net — build fast without risking major cost missteps.
- Business Dimensions. We allocate MongoDB spend according to where the money’s actually going. We can distinguish R&D spend from production spend and automatically trace it to the relevant customers, products, teams, and more.
- Accurate Unit Economics and Cost Per Customer: CloudZero is the only cost solution that enables customers to ingest unit cost telemetry, accurately apportioning shared spend, such as multi-tenant costs. This can be applied to MongoDB in addition to every other cost source customers bring into the platform.
All of which means you can innovate with the confidence that you’re staying inbounds, costwise. No more leaving unused resources on, no more manually connecting spend to products and customers, no more labor-intensive ad-hoc spend exploration projects.
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