Introducing the MongoDB Community Kit

MongoDB
October 16, 2013 | Updated: January 20, 2017
#Releases

Open source projects thrive as a reflection of the participation and enthusiasm of their communities. MongoDB is a great example of a global community, and we have seen a number of people, like MongoDB MUG organizers and MongoDB Masters, create lasting impact for MongoDB through their work with the community. To encourage growth in the MongoDB Community, we’ve taken what we’ve learned and turned into a new resource: The MongoDB Community Kit.

Sometimes people want to get involved but aren’t sure how how to get started. This tool can help you as a user and a community member contribute to the project in whatever way you like. Based on our experiences with thousands of developers over the past 4 years, the MongoDB community team have developed a number of techniques that will help you provide valuable impact. For instance, you can:

Give a talk on how you scaled your MongoDB infrastructure
Write a blog post with real advice on how to use MongoDB in production
Create an open source tool for MongoDB that enables other users to code faster and create better deployments.
Create a User Group in your local area that educates new users and brings a community together
Contribute to the community in whichever way you like, even if it isn’t listed in the Community Kit. The invitation is open.

The Kit is available on Github as an open source project. This makes it easy to access, fork and update. This package is released under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Just like any other project, this kit gets better when users contribute their knowledge, so we encourage you to submit a pull request and add your feedback.

Some suggestions:

Add some posters you created for a MUG
Post your “Intro to MongoDB Slides”
Fork the kit and translate it into your own language and share with your community

We’re looking forward to seeing all the great activity coming from the community. Keep the pull requests coming!

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How to Stay Relevant by Listening to Your Users: A Lesson from ADP

ADP is quietly adapting its business to meet the demands of the modern consumer. With over $10B in revenues and 600,000 clients, ADP is one of the largest business outsourcing solution providers in the world. While a slew of technology startups are disrupting established industries – from payments to taxis to healthcare – ADP focuses on innovation to maintain leadership. This strategy is driven from the top, but depends upon the bedrock of flexible data infrastructure like MongoDB to make it work. IT As Innovator For CIO Mike Capone, IT must be a source of innovation, and to that end he expects his team to be an integral part of product development. To facilitate this, Capone created an IT innovation lab and also holds an annual conference in which top ADP executives showcase new ideas. To ensure his team doesn’t operate in a vacuum, Capone requires members of his leadership team to spend a day and a half with customers each month. Not surprisingly, as part of these activities ADP learned that its customers (and their end-users) wanted a better mobile experience. ADP validated this need, finding in its own survey that employee smartphone use now exceeds 50% for large and midsize companies, which mobile interest is even greater for some other demographics. Millennials, for example, may only check email occasionally on a laptop, but some have an 80% open rate on their smartphones (ADP). So ADP began to build mobile apps. One such app, ADP Mobile Solutions, provides employees a view of all HR services – payroll, T&E, benefits and others – within a single, elegant design. The goal was to give employees the ability to view the services they care about on the device of their choice. If an employee wants to check her copay while at the doctor’s office, that should be simple, intuitive and accessible on a smartphone. The results are staggering. Since launching over two years ago, the app has amassed over one million users across 41,000 clients. It is available in 17 countries and 23 languages, and remains one of the top 15 iOS free business apps. Systems uptime has increased and more projects are closer to timeline and budget, precipitating a rise in top and bottom lines. All of which is great, but how has Capone’s work influenced sales? According to Capone, sales productivity has risen by 20% due to better products. Those “better products,” in turn, derive from far better data: Capone tracks everything from the number of appointments it takes to close a deal on a new product to how often the new product is sold in a given launch period. Building Its Mobile Future On MongoDB When designing the mobile app and the associated infrastructure, the ADP team evaluated a number of technologies and chose MongoDB for the database. According to Jigesh Saheba, chief architect at ADP Innovation Labs, they chose it for several reasons. To ensure a pleasant user experience, the database had to be fast. It also needed to scale to support a massive user base. To live up to modern consumer standards, it had to be reliable and redundant across multiple data centers. Perhaps most importantly, the database had to be flexible and adaptable in order to support ADP’s mission for constant innovation. But it also needed to retain some of the features of relational databases – like rich querying and secondary indexing – in order to enable the feature set that the team wanted to implement. MongoDB met all these requirements, empowering ADP to bring a mobile app to market quickly, and then iterate on it continuously. Saheba’s team is a model for startup-grade innovation in a large enterprise, combining product development and operations into a single cadre known as devops. Not only has the team provided 100% uptime, but since launching the app, it has unearthed clever ways to listen to users and cater to their needs. For instance, by observing usage patterns in the app, the team found that when users look at a pay stub, a common next step is to compare it to the last. So they added a button to compare pay stubs in a single step. Similarly, ADP uses predictive caching to push relevant content to users – like a 401K statement – when that content is updated. <img src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/info-mongodb-com/_com_assets/media/ADP_Slide_15.png" style="width:90%";/> Having reaped the benefits of MongoDB to deliver a personalized mobile app, ADP is now looking to implement the database across the organization. Options include a MongoDB-as-a-Service internal offering to ADP developers and a Big Data platform. Enabling Innovation One App At A Time To the enterprise looking to stay relevant and to prevent upstart technology companies from disrupting their businesses, consider: What are you doing to listen to your users? And how does your database infrastructure support the innovation required to respond to them? See below for Jigesh Saheba’s interview with Silicon Angle’s The Cube.

October 15, 2013

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The Journey of MongoDB with COVESA in the Connected Vehicle Landscape

There’s a popular saying: “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” I would argue The Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance (COVESA) in partnership with their extensive member network, turns this saying on its head. They have found a way to go fast, together and also go far, together. COVESA is an industry alliance focused on enabling the widespread adoption of connected vehicle systems. This group aims to accelerate the development of these technologies through collaboration and standardization. It's made up of various stakeholders in the automotive and technology sectors, including car manufacturers, suppliers, and tech companies. COVESA’s collaborative approach allows members to accelerate progress. Shared solutions eliminate the need for individual members to reinvent the wheel. This frees up their resources to tackle new challenges, as the community collectively builds, tests, and refines foundational components. As vehicles become more connected, the data they generate explodes in volume, variety, and velocity. Cars are no longer just a mode of transportation, but a platform for advanced technology and data-driven services. This is where MongoDB steps in. MongoDB.local NYC Join us in person on May 2, 2024 for our keynote address, announcements, and technical sessions to help you build and deploy mission-critical applications at scale. Use Code Web50 for 50% off your ticket! Learn More MongoDB and COVESA As the database trusted for mission-critical systems by enterprises such as Cathay Pacific , Volvo Connect , or Cox Automotive ; MongoDB has gained expertise in automotive, along with many other industries, building cross-industry knowledge in handling large-scale, diverse data sets. This in turn enables us to contribute significantly to vehicle applications and provide a unique view, especially in the data architecture discussions within COVESA. MongoDB solutions support these kinds of innovations, enabling automotive companies to leverage data for advanced features. One of the main features we provide is Atlas Device SDKs : a low-footprint, embedded database directly living on ECUs. It can synchronize data automatically with the cloud using Atlas Device Sync , our data transfer protocol that compresses the data handles conflict resolution, and only syncs delta changes, making it extremely efficient in terms of operations and maintenance. VSS: The backbone of connected vehicle data An important area of COVESA’s work is the Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS). VSS is a standardized framework used to describe data of a vehicle, such as speed, location, and diagnostic information. This standardization is essential for interoperability between different systems and components within a vehicle, as well as for external communication with other vehicles and infrastructure. VSS has been gaining more and more adoption, and it’s backed by ongoing contributions from BMW, Volvo Cars, Jaguar LR, Robert Bosch and Geotab, among others. MongoDB’s BSON and our Object-oriented Device SDKs uniquely position us to contribute to VSS implementation. The VSS data structured maps 1 to 1 to documents in MongoDB and objects in Atlas Device SDKs , which simplifies development, and speeds up applications by completely skipping any Relational Mapper layer. For every read or write, there is no need to transform the data between relational and VSS. Our insights into data structuring, querying, and management can help optimize the way data is stored and accessed in connected vehicles, making it more efficient and robust. Where MongoDB contributes MongoDB, within COVESA, finds its most meaningful contributions in areas where data complexities and community collaboration intersect. First, we can share insights into managing vast and varied data emerging from connected vehicles generating data on everything from engine performance to driver behavior. Second, we have an important role in supporting the standardization efforts, crucial for ensuring different systems within vehicles can communicate seamlessly. Our inputs can help ensure these standards are robust and practical, considering the real-world scenarios of data usage in vehicles. Some of our contributions include an Over the Air update architectural review presented at Troy COVESA’s AMM in October 2023; sharing insights about the Data Middleware PoC with BMW; and weekly contributions at the Data Expert Group. You can find some of our contributions on COVESA’s Wiki page . In essence, MongoDB's role in COVESA is about providing a unique perspective from the database management point of view, offering our understanding from different industries and use cases to support the developments towards more connected and intelligent vehicles. MongoDB, COVESA, and AWS together at CES2024 MongoDB’s most recent collaboration with COVESA was at the Consumer Electronics Show CES 2024 during which MongoDB’s Connected Vehicle solution was showcased. This solution leverages Atlas Device SDKs, such as the SDK for C++ , which enables local data storage, in-vehicle data synchronization, and also uni and bi-directional data transfer with the cloud. Below is a schematic illustrating the integration of MongoDB within the software-defined vehicle: Schema 1: End to end integration for the connected vehicle At CES 2024, MongoDB also teamed up with AWS for a compelling presentation, " AI-powered Connected Vehicles with MongoDB and AWS " led by Dr. Humza Akhtar and Mohan Yellapantula, Head of Automotive Solutions & Go To Market at AWS. The session delved into the intricacies of building connected vehicle user experiences using MongoDB Atlas. It showcased the combined strengths of MongoDB's expertise and AWS's generative AI tools, emphasizing how Atlas Vector Search unlocks the full lifecycle value of connected vehicle data. During the event, MongoDB also engaged in a conversation with The Six Five, exploring various aspects of mobility, self-driving vehicles (SDVs), and the MongoDB and AWS partnership. This discussion extended to merging IT and OT, GenAI, Atlas Edger Server, and Atlas Device SDK. Going forward At the end of the road, it’s all about enhancing the end-user experience and providing unique value propositions. Defect diagnosis based on the acoustics of the engine, improved crash assistance with mobile and vehicle telemetry data, just-in-time food ordering while on the road, in-vehicle payments, and much, much more. What all these experiences have in common is the combination of interconnected data from different systems. At MongoDB, we are laser-focused on empowering OEMs to create, transform, and disrupt the automotive industry by unleashing the power of software and data. We enable this by: Partnering with alliances such as COVESA to build a strong ecosystem or collaboration. Having one single API for In-vehicle Data Storage, Edge to Cloud Synchronization, Time Series storage, and more, improves the developer experience. Focusing on having a robust, scalable, and secure suite of services trusted by tens of thousands of customers in more than 100 countries. Together with COVESA’s vision for connected vehicles, we’re driving a future where this industry is safer, more efficient, and seamlessly integrated into the digital world. The journey is just beginning. To learn more about MongoDB-connected mobility solutions, visit the MongoDB for Manufacturing & Motion webpage . Achieving fast, reliable and compressed data exchange is one of the pillars of Software Defined Vehicles, learn how MongoDB Atlas and Edge Server can help in this short demo .

April 15, 2024