In this recipe, we will be evaluating one of the vendors, MongoLab, providing MongoDB as a service. This introductory recipe will introduce to you what MongoDB as a service is, and then it will demonstrate how to set up and manage an account in MongoLab (https://mongolab.com/).
In all the recipes in this book, we have covered setting up, administering, monitoring, and developing the instances of MongoDB in the organizations/personal premises so far. This not only needs man power with the appropriate skill set to manage the deployments, but also appropriate hardware to install and run Mongo servers. This needs large investments upfront that might not be a viable solution for start-ups or even organizations that are not clear about adopting this technology or migrating to it. They might want to evaluate it and see how it goes before moving full fledged to this solution. What would be ideal is to have a service provider that takes care of hosting the MongoDB deployments, managing, and monitoring the deployments, and providing support. The organizations that opt for these services need not invest upfront in setting up the servers nor recruit or outsource to consultants for the administration and monitoring of the instances. All that one needs to do is choose the hardware and software platform, configuration, and the appropriate MongoDB version, and set up an environment from a user-friendly GUI. It even gives you an option to use your existing cloud provider's servers.
Having explained in brief what these vendor-hosting services do and why they are needed, we will start this recipe by setting up an account with MongoLab and see some basic user and account management. MongoLab is by no means the only hosting provider for MongoDB. You might also want to take a look at http://www.mongohq.com/ and http://www.objectrocket.com/. At the time of writing this book, MongoDB itself started providing MongoDB as a service on Azure cloud and is currently in beta phase.
- Visit https://mongolab.com/signup/ to sign up. If you don't have an account created, just fill in the relevant details and create an account.
- Once the account is created, click on the Account link in the top-right corner of the page, as shown in the following screenshot:
- Click on the Account Users tab in the top-left corner; it should be selected by default:
- To add a new account, click on the + Add account user button. One pop-up window will ask for the username, e-mail ID, and password of the user. Enter the relevant details, and click on the Add button.
- Click on the user, and you will be able to navigate to a page where you can change the username, e-mail ID, and password. You might transfer the admin rights to the user by clicking on the Change to Admin button on this page.
- Similarly, by clicking on your own user details, you will have the options to change the username, e-mail ID, and password.
- Click on the Set up two-factor authentication button to activate the multifactor authentication using Google Authenticator. You need to have the Google Authenticator installed on your Android, iOS, or BlackBerry phone to proceed with the setup of multifactor authentication.
- On clicking on the button, we should see the QR code that can be scanned using the Google Authenticator, or if scanning is not possible, click on the URL underneath the QR code, which will show the code. Manually set up a time-based account in the Google Authenticator. There are two types of Google Authenticator accounts: time based and counter based. For more details, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Authenticator.
- Similarly, you can delete users from the Account page by clicking on the cross next to the user's row under Account Users.
There is nothing much to explain in this section. The setup process and user administration are pretty simple. Note that the users we added here are not database users. These are the users that have access to Account on MongoLab, for which we added them. The account can be the name of the organization and can be seen at the top of the screen. The multifactor authentication account set up in the Google Authenticator software on the handheld device should not be deleted, as whenever the user logs in to the MongoLab account from the browser, he will be asked to enter the Google Authenticator account to continue.