Our SPA will soon live in the cloud, and it needs to be connected to a database. Moving our application to the cloud requires our database also to be accessible from the Web. Having a database running on your local machine isn't going to cut it.
There are a number of cloud-based database services, but I have found that MongoLab is one of the easiest to set up, use, and maintain. They offer a free sandbox database, which is perfect for development and experimentation. For production-level applications, you'd want to look into a higher subscription rate.
The PaaS we will use to deploy our application, Heroku, plays really well with MongoLab, and even offers Mongolab as a one-click add-on. We will set things up manually for now so you can learn how things work a little better.
The first thing you need to do is to set up your account on MongoLab. This couldn't be simpler. Go to https://mongolab.com/signup/ and fill in the form. After you've...