Since announcing MongoDB 4.2 back in June 2019, plenty of you have been putting it through its paces and rolling it into production – spinning up over 5 million instances and making it our fastest growing release ever.
We’re happy to announce that you can now evaluate the latest version for free, with all operations fully-managed for you, on the MongoDB Atlas free tier.

What do I get with MongoDB 4.2 on the Atlas free tier?

You can provision your free MongoDB 4.2 cluster in any one of 19 (and counting) regions on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud that offer the Atlas free tier.
Every free tier (M0) cluster is free-forever, automatically deployed on version 4.2, and comes with up to 512MB of storage for you to test the latest database features, including:

• Client-side Field Level Encryption (FLE). Building upon our existing in-motion (TLS) and at-rest encryption, FLE enables you to selectively encrypt individual document fields, each optionally secured with its own key. Everything is managed automatically client-side, with the server only ever handling ciphertext. See the FLE guide for a walkthrough.
• On-demand materialized views, designed to accelerate the performance of common analytics queries by incrementing and enriching your result sets as new data is processed by the aggregation pipeline. Read the blog post to get started.
• Wildcard indexes, ideal for polymorphic document structures and when you don’t know all your users’ query access patterns in advance. Watch the demo to learn more.
• Enhancements to the MongoDB Query Language. Check out this blog post to see examples of how all of this helps you compose more powerful queries with less code.

One 4.2 feature you won’t be able to try out in the free tier is Distributed Transactions, as they require a sharded cluster. However, all of MongoDB 4.2’s ACID transaction semantics for deployments on a replica set are fully available to you.

How do I get started?

Our documentation steps you through how to create an Atlas free tier cluster on the cloud provider and region of your choice. It also includes instructions on how to load our pre-prepared sample datasets for a quick way to start exploring 4.2. Of course, you are free to load your own data into the cluster as well!
For an in-depth look at the functionality, register for our free online course on MongoDB 4.2 available on MongoDB University.
With MongoDB 4.2 now available on the Atlas free tier, it’s easier than ever to get your hands on the latest and greatest release of the database. Let us know how it goes in the comments below.