What Is Atlas Data Federation?
Learners will describe the Data Federation architecture, the types of data sources it supports, and the query engine that unifies them.
The Problem: Data Lives Everywhere
Modern applications generate data across multiple systems: live operational data in MongoDB Atlas, historical archives in Amazon S3, and analytics exports in data lakes. Querying across these silos traditionally requires data pipelines, ETL jobs, and separate query engines. Atlas Data Federation solves this by letting you query all these sources with a single MongoDB connection and the familiar aggregation pipeline.
What Is Atlas Data Federation?
Atlas Data Federation is a fully managed query engine built into MongoDB Atlas. It creates a federated database instance — a virtual MongoDB deployment that maps data from multiple sources (Atlas clusters, S3 buckets, Atlas Data Lake, HTTP endpoints) to virtual collections. You connect with a standard MongoDB connection string and use the same aggregation pipeline you already know.
// Connect to a federated database instance
// The URI looks like a regular Atlas connection string
// mongodb://...@data.mongodb-api.com/federated
const client = new MongoClient(
'mongodb+srv://federated-instance.mongodb.net/myFederatedDB'
)