MongoDB’s goal with its Database as a Service offering is to provide a streamlined experience that helps frontend developers.

When MongoDB launched Atlas, its managed Database as a Service offering, six years ago, managed cloud databases were still a hard sale to about half the executives at enterprises with legacy systems, said Andrew Davidson, who oversees Atlas as the senior president of product.

“Probably two years into our Atlas journey — so four years ago — I pretty much no longer felt like I even had to have the lift and shift conversation,” he said.

At the time, companies were shifting data to the cloud, but still managing the databases in virtual machines that were running on public cloud infrastructure, he said.

“What they quickly realized was they were not really getting that much benefit from having moved to cloud,” Davidson told The New Stack. Yes they were in the cloud, but they were managing a bunch of virtual machines and it created unnecessary complexity, he explained.

“In a self-managed paradigm, whether on-prem or in the public cloud, you still have layers of this iceberg beneath the waves that you might not think about at first glance,” he said.