MongoLab on Windows Azure

Over the past few months we have been working closely with Microsoft to bring MongoLab to the Windows Azure platform, and today we are proud to announce our official Preview launch of MongoLab in Azure’s East US and West US datacenters.

Windows Azure is the fourth cloud provider we have added support for, and we find their offering to be very exciting for the industry. Azure is both IaaS (like EC2), and a PaaS (like Heroku or AppFog). It offers both Windows and Linux VMs (bet you did not expect that!) and supports multiple programming environments including Node.js, PHP, Java, and Python in addition to its .NET platform. It even has awesome command-line support as well as a web-based console.  We have high hopes for Azure becoming a great platform for developers.

So what does this integration with Azure mean?

With this integration, you can now use MongoLab on Windows Azure in two ways:

(1) Via MongoLab. Now when you create a database on http://mongolab.com, Windows Azure will be offered as a deployment option. Just select Windows Azure as your cloud provider, select which Azure datacenter you want, and you are good to go. While previously unannounced, we have been supporting our free sandbox database in this way for several months with great success. Now it is official!

(2) Via the Windows Azure Store. As of today we now offer seamless integration with the Windows Azure PaaS platform via an add-on service that you can provision directly from the Windows Azure management console. Just click on the MongoLab icon and follow the instructions from there.

With either method, you get the full MongoLab experience on the Windows Azure platform with a nice low-latency connection between your Azure-based application and your MongoDB database.

Is it ready for production?

Almost, but not quite yet. Right now the Azure Linux VMs we use to run our MongoDB instances are in “Preview” (i.e. Beta), and we expect them to go GA (Generally Available) in the coming months. Shortly after the Linux VMs go GA we will come out of Beta and go GA with our offering. So for now we are only offering our free sandbox plans on Azure with our Dedicated plans available to a select set of Beta customers. We plan to make the rest of our plans generally available as soon as possible.

How do I get started?

It’s easy! If you don’t yet have a MongoLab account, you can create one here. If you already have an account, just use our UI to make a new free database on Window’s Azure, and if you already have a Window’s Azure account, you can start here and have a database running in seconds.

We are also working on some great content to help you start writing apps using Azure and MongoLab. Our first installment is an example using C#, with more language examples to follow:

https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/tutorials/website-with-mongodb-mongolab/

We look forward to hearing your feedback as you play around with MongoLab on Azure. Stay tuned… this is just the beginning.

Sincerely,
will@mongolab

P.S. The press release is available here: BusinessWire

Update 2012-10-31 09:45 : added BusinessWire press release