If you use MongoDB, atlas should be a no brainer
What do you like best?
Centralized management for my global distribution. GUI-based point and click configuration. Charts and dashboards for monitoring, system health, and status reporting. Incredibly easy to deploy new regions. Excellent Azure availability zone coverage around the world. Honestly, without Atlas, we would not be using MongoDB - it is the only real option for a global solution.
What do you dislike?
Pricing can be very confusing when you start getting into all the different services. Their UI for data access is incredibly minimalistic. When you go into a collection, it automatically selects the first random collection and runs a select top X rows query - this seriously slows down presentation in the UI if you are looking for a specific database. Automation tools around data management are slowly catching up with where I would expect - specifically around rolling off old data to cold storage. Onboarding data, managing data, and backups that exist is OK - I would expect robust tools to offload my data from an enterprise solution such as this.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
We offer a globally distributed SaaS cloud-based solution to our customers. Each of our customers has its own unique database to store their data. MongoDB Atlas has allowed us to offer this service. It would be significantly more costly and burdensome if we were to spin up our own servers and distribute them around the globe. MongoDB atlas makes it a push-button process instead of hundreds of hours of DevOps.