I don’t expect anyone to really read this. I currently have virtually no traffic to my blog (or site), but I would like to document my progress on Gang War if for no one other than myself. If, somehow, the game takes off, it would be nice to look back and remember what the development phase was like.

Yesterday, I signed up with MongoDB Atlas as a datastore for player profiles and progress. I was blown away at how easy it was to use the interface. Everything from creating collections, viewing data, managing permissions was incredibly simple and FAST. I love AWS, but I have to say it is cumbersome to manage sometimes. I spent half a day trying to set up a Mongo cluster on Elastic Beanstalk, and had to give up – and I have moderate prior experience with Beanstalk! With Atlas, I signed up, created my collections, and had it dynamically hooked up to my development server in less than an hour. And they even have a free tier you can try out! I’ll probably upgrade to a paid cluster soon since I have zero complaints so far. Kudos to the Atlas team!
https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/atlas