You don't have to be in the same zone or the same cloud, you just need be in roughly the same DC area and buy 10 Gig Direct Connect links from AWS. This is possible in places like London, Ashburn, VA, Dublin which is why many of these providers only offer their service in a subset of a cloud providers locations. The latency is is basically imperceptible ~1-2ms.

You can get an awful lot of customers just by being in Ashburn VA with direct connects to to the big cloud providers. Most queries to a DB like mongo are slow enough that 1ms of network latency is just noise.

Really? Stock Postgres is faster than a well-optimised Mongo deployment, in my experience.

(Apples to oranges, sure, but Postgres has the capability to be a great document store as well.)

> Especially if your data model is document orientated.

You shouldn't be using MongoDB for anything but documents.

Doesn't mean it might not change hands again! (as unlikely as that would be)

As for latency, with Mlab you were able to specify the cloud provider and zone IIRC, not sure if other competitors like Compose have that

> with Mlab you were able to specify the cloud provider and zone IIRC

That's correct, you specify a provider and region but can also set up VPC peering so all traffic remains within AWS' network within a region. I've used this setup - mLab on AWS with VPC peering and it worked great.

But specifying the zone won't help since zones are not consistent across different accounts, so while you can ensure your in the same region, you may still end up talking across different data centers. Do they have anyway to handle this?

The same features exist in Atlas, so you should be good to go there.

Compose is hosting other types of databases now. I think the move for Mongo is to be THE platform for Mongo developers