MongoLab, a cloud hosting database provider in San Francisco that was formed by ObjectLabs, announced that it closed a $3 million series A funding round earlier today.

MongoLab is a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider for MongoDB, 10gen’s scalable, open-source, document-oriented database. The MongoDB is widley used by companies like Foursquare, bit.ly, and Etsy. MongoLab enables cloud-based hosting for MongoDB users on Amazon’s EC2 and Rackspace, and manages replication, backups, monitoring and uptime — the tedious stuff — so that your team doesn’t have to.

“Developers have spent the better part of their careers writing code to change the shape of their data between object form and relational form. I recently heard one VP of Engineering refer to it as ‘our Vietnam’”, Shulman said. “Since JSON is an object format, MongoDB makes a lot of these problems disappear. Developers have been waiting years for something like this”. Mongolab is excited that it can provide a scalable solution for cloud scaling and hosting.

“The folks at 10gen, the makers of MongoDB, made all the right trade-offs: a general-purpose query
language, a generic way of indexing, and very configurable consistency semantics. And it scales. For these reasons we see MongoDB as a general-purpose DB that’s highly scalable, rather than a very specialized data store”, Shulman concluded.

MongoLab is currently in beta both for its multi-tenant database plans and as a Heroku add-on and is in alpha with a dedicated server offering. Developers can begin test driving MongoLab now using its free plan, and get started in minutes.