Make IoT a Reality at MongoDB World

Millions of people monitor their homes with “Smart Home” technology. A small genomic sequencer the size of a small cellphone helps health workers understand the spread of viruses like Ebola and stop the an epidemic in its tracks.

One of the largest transformations in the twenty first century is the Internet of Things (IoT) - the availability for devices to process sensor data and to analyze this data for new insights in real time. IoT has been adopted across many industries, from home services to retail to industrial manufacturing.

MongoDB World will showcase customers who have turned to MongoDB to tackle the complicated world of IoT. Learn more about how MongoDB is securing homes, tracking the spread of Ebola and more through IoT.

Building and Scaling the Internet of Things with MongoDB at Vivint

Three years ago Vivint started an ambitious initiative to make the Smart Home mainstream. Their new platform had to have ultimate extensibility, ultra-low latency, a wide array of functionality out of the gate, and it had to be ready to attach millions of devices in its first year of operation. With only a year to go from concept to customers, Nick Brown’s team at Vivint chose to built a brand new integration platform based around MongoDB. 8 million devices and 1 billion messages per day later, Nick will share best practices for architecting scaleable IoT platforms based on his experience.

Building an IoT Network

In this session, Dave de Groote will share how he and a team of developers built new IoT network for the largest Telecom in Belgium. You’ll learn about the system’s requirements and how they arrived at MongoDB. Dave will also walk you through some of the application design and schema tradeoffs they made, how they defined storage engine requirements, and the aggregation and indexing strategies that allow for read-intensive and high performance systems.

Building the Internet of Living Things

Oxford Nanopore Technologies uses MongoDB to help prevent the spread viruses by analyzing genetic material in real-time.

The UK-based company has built a handheld device that can analyze any piece of genetic material in just a few hours, rather than the weeks it had taken previously.

This speed is enabled by Oxford Nanopore’s MongoDB-powered cloud deployment that lets users access its genetic database anywhere in the world. Their device, MinIon, is being used in Guinea to track the outbreak of Ebola, and will soon be tested by NASA in the international space station. At MongoDB World, you’ll meet Richard Carter, Associate Director of Data Integration at Oxford Nanopore Technologies, who will teach you how they build the software behind the MinIon device to rapidly analyze complex genomic information. You’ll learn how they simplify operations with Cloud Manager and how they optimize their schemas for fast reads.

The Device Mesh and the User Experience: A 3 Part Series on IoT and MongoDB

Want IoT from soup to nuts? Join the Next Gen Apps track, you get three sessions that cover architecting, operationalizing, and deploying an app. The three-part session on IoT is led by a veteran team of MongoDB experts, Jake Angerman and Jay Runkel. In this series they’ll walk you through

  • IoT architectures
  • Complex analytical queries
  • Data ingestion processes
  • Efficient sharding techniques
  • Native MongoDB analytics options
  • Connecting to Spark and external BI sources

Are you looking to build IoT applications with MongoDB? Join us at MongoDB World to learn the from the experts on analytics, operations and more. Early Bird ticket pricing ends May 13, so snag your tickets now below.

Register for MongoDB World 2016

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Building Modern Applications with Microservices: Part 1

This is the first in a two post series about microservices. This post discusses the background behind microservices, new technologies that have enabled them, and the benefit of microservices. Introduction As enterprises work to replicate the development agility of internet companies and innovate in highly competitive markets, application development has grown increasingly complex. The large, monolithic codebases that traditionally power enterprise applications make it difficult to quickly launch new services. Siloed and potentially distributed development and operations teams present organizational alignment problems. On top of this, users are more demanding than ever – enterprises need to scale effectively and monitor deployments to ensure customers are provided with high performance and a consistent experience. Of course, all this needs to be done while providing always-on service availability. Due to these trends, there is demand for a software architecture pattern that can handle the requirements of the modern age. Monolithic architectures have been the traditional approach, but limitations with scaling, difficulties in maintaining a large codebase, high risk upgrades, and large upfront setup costs have compelled enterprises to explore different approaches. In the last few years, microservices have come to the forefront of the conversation. They have been rapidly adopted, due to their ability to provide modularity, scalability, high availability, as well as facilitate organizational alignment. The Monolith Before microservices, a common approach to application design was to use a monolithic architecture. In this mode of development, the application is developed, tested, packaged, and deployed as a single unit. Codebases are compiled together, and the application is deployed as one entity. Scaling required copying instances of the application binaries and the required libraries to different servers, and the application code typically ran as a single process. Continuous delivery — an approach that involves fast, iterative software development and safe updates to the deployed application — was challenging since the full monolithic application stack needed to be recompiled, relinked, and tested for even the smallest incremental release. What are Microservices? Microservices is a software architecture where applications are broken down into small autonomous services. Services are typically focused on a specific, discrete objective or function and decoupled along business boundaries. Separating services by business boundaries allows teams to focus on the right goals and also ensures autonomy between services. Each service is developed, tested, and deployed independently, and services are usually separated as independent processes that communicate over a network via agreed APIs, although in some cases that network may be local to the machine. Microservices grew from Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which gained popularity in the early 2000s and emerged as a way to combat large monolithic applications. Key differences between SOA and microservices are: SOAs are stateful, while microservices are stateless SOAs tend to use a enterprise service bus for communication, while microservices use a less elaborate and simple messaging system SOAs may have hundreds or thousands of lines of code, while microservices could have less than one hundred lines SOAs put a greater emphasis on reusability (i.e. runtime code, databases), whereas microservices focus on decoupling as much as possible A systematic change in a SOA requires modifying the monolith, whereas a systematic change in a microservice is to create a new service SOAs use traditional relational databases more often, while microservices gravitate more towards modern, non-relational databases. Further sections will cover the advantages of non-relational databases over relational databases in a microservices architecture Many architects found that SOAs suffered problems with communication protocols and lacked sufficient guidelines on effectively separating services, which laid the foundation for microservices to emerge as a best practice method to implement a truly SOA. New Technologies Enable Microservices The downsides of deploying and provisioning hundreds and potentially thousands of services did not outweigh the benefits gained with a microservices architecture (faster development, scalability). The emergence of technologies such as containers (Docker, LXC) and orchestration frameworks (Kubernetes, Mesos) mitigate many of the problems that prevented using microservices architectures in the past. Containers are lightweight run-time environments that provide isolation and scalability with minimal impact to performance and capacity. Packaging is simplified as the same environment can simultaneously host development, support, test, and production versions of the application, so that going from dev to test to QA to production is easier. Containers work very well in a microservices environment as they isolate services to an individual container. Updating a service becomes a simple process to automate and manage, and changing one service will not impact other services, provided that APIs are maintained. Figure 1: Container in microservices When organizations start running containers at scale, many look to orchestration frameworks to help manage the increased complexity. Orchestration frameworks help deploy and manage containers: provision hosts, instantiate containers, handle failures, and provide automated scaling. Kubernetes and Mesos are popular orchestration frameworks that make it easier to deploy containers at massive scale in a microservice environment. To learn more about building microservices architectures with containers and MongoDB, download our guide: Enabling Microservices: Containers and Orchestration Explained Benefits of Microservices Many organizations can better meet the needs of modern application development by implementing microservices. The benefits include: Faster Time To Market: In a monolithic application, any small change in the application will require redeploying the entire application stack, which carries higher risk and complexity. This results in longer release cycles, as changes may be batched together and not released until reaching a minimum threshold. With microservices, a small change to a service can be committed, tested, and deployed immediately since changes are isolated from the rest of the system. Continuous integration — a software practice of integrating and testing developer changes to the main code branch multiple times a day — is much simpler and faster as there are fewer functions to test. This results in a more iterative release cadence as less code needs to be compiled and retested. Orchestration tools such as Kubernetes facilitate faster time to market by automating the on-line, rolling upgrade of containers, and providing the ability to roll back any changes should they be necessary. Flexibility and Scalability: Monolithic applications require all components of the system to scale together. If one service requires extra performance, the only option is to scale all the services rather than the individual service that needs additional capacity. With microservices, only the services that require extra performance need to be scaled. Scaling is achieved by deploying more containers, enabling more effective capacity planning, less software licensing costs, and lower TCO as the service and hardware can be matched more appropriately. Figure 2: Scaling containers Resiliency: A major issue with monolithic applications is that if a service fails, the whole application may be compromised. In microservices, service boundaries serve as natural isolation barriers to prevent cascading failures from bringing down the whole system. If using containers, orchestration frameworks can provide added resiliency: when one container fails, a new one is started, restoring full redundancy and capacity. Alignment With Organization: Microservices enable better alignment of the architecture to the organization, as team sizes can be optimally defined to match the required tasks. Teams can be broken down into smaller groups and focus on a single component of the application. This is especially useful for distributed teams. For example, if a team in Singapore handles three services, while a team in San Francisco handles five services, each team can release and deploy features and functionalities independently. This helps break down silos between teams and fosters better collab oration as cross discipline teams (Ops, Dev, QA) collectively own the services. This also ensures that the communication between teams matches the communication through the services' APIs. Essentially, the APIs between services define a contract between development teams on what each service should provide to others. Reduction in Cost: By using containers, applications and environments (design, test, production, support) can better share the same infrastructure, resulting in increased hardware utilization and reduced costs due to administrative simplification. In addition, microservices also help reduce technical debt. With a monolithic application, there are costs (time, resources) associated with refactoring code for a large application. By breaking the application into API accessible microservices, code refactoring can be done service by service, resulting in less time maintaining and updating code. In the second part of this blog post series , we will discuss how MongoDB enables microservices. Learn more about MongoDB and microservices. Read the white paper. Microservices: The Evolution of Building Modern Applications About the Author - Jason Ma Jason is a Principal Product Marketing Manager based in Palo Alto, and has extensive experience in technology hardware and software. He previously worked for SanDisk in Corporate Strategy doing M&A and investments, and as a Product Manager on the Infiniflash All-Flash JBOF. Before SanDisk, he worked as a HW engineer at Intel and Boeing. Jason has a BSEE from UC San Diego, MSEE from the University of Southern California, and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

May 6, 2016
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Congratulations to the 2023 APAC Innovation Award Winners

I’m thrilled to announce the nine winners of the 2023 MongoDB APAC Innovation Awards . The MongoDB Innovation Awards honor projects and people who dream big. They celebrate the groundbreaking use of data to build compelling applications and the creativity of professionals expanding the limits of technology with MongoDB. This year, we have broken the awards down regionally to celebrate organizations in APAC, from startups to industry-leading enterprises, across a wide variety of industries, who are delivering big results. We are delighted to announce the winners below: 2023 MongoDB APAC Innovation Award Winners: Positive Impact Open Government Products Open Government Products (OGP) is an in-house team of engineers, designers, and product managers, who is a part of the Singapore Government, and is responsible for building technologies for the public good. OGP used MongoDB’s developer data platform, MongoDB Atlas to create its digital form builder, FormSG. Used by the Singapore government and public healthcare institutions, FormSG securely collects data from residents and businesses and helps public officers to create digital government forms in minutes. It eliminates the use of paper forms and the manual process of transcribing physical documents, which had raised concerns around data privacy and protection. During the pandemic, FormSG enabled public officers to collect more than 100,000 daily temperature declarations nationwide. Today, FormSG has served more than 120,000 public officers from 155 agencies and it has created more than 500,000 digital forms to help the government collect data on travel and health declarations by visitors to the country, applications for COVID-19 swab tests, and applications for financial assistance. Organization Transformation Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Bendigo and Adelaide Bank is one of Australia’s largest banks, with around 7,000 employees helping more than 2.2 million customers achieve their financial goals. The bank has been on a multi-year journey of transformation using MongoDB's developer data platform to improve efficiency and deliver a better customer experience as they fulfill their vision to become Australia’s bank of choice. Recently, the cloud team launched Ready-Set-MongoDB (or RSM). This event-driven framework allows developers to streamline the consumption of internal or external APIs, and applies data transformations and storage automatically within a MongoDB collection of their choice. Using MongoDB Atlas Search, the bank also enabled developers to gain insights across its multi-cloud deployments, identifying cost savings, and providing inventory information to account owners and technical stakeholders. Within the first 18 months of launching these programmes, the automation had saved the organization more than 1,100 developers days. It also helped reduce human involvement, removed stale data, and allowed engineers to focus on the things that matter. The development of Ready-Set-MongoDB is ongoing and improving, as new Bendigo multi-cloud challenges arise and new MongoDB products are released. The application is a perfect representation of how Bendigo's Technology Department is using modern technology, rapid development, and innovation-led problem solving to drive organizational transformation. Heroes in Health Redcliffe Lifetech Private Limited Over the last few years, Redcliffe Labs has become India's fastest growing technology-driven diagnostics service provider. Redcliffe Labs is on a mission to serve 500 Million Indians by 2030 with fusion of technology and world- class laboratories. The company already serves thousands of people daily, with more than 73 labs and close to 1500 walk-in centers across 180 cities. Redcliffe Labs has relied on MongoDB Atlas’ flexible document model to power its innovative Smart Health Report, a patient resource that provides a number of indicators and trackers to gauge holistic health. The MongoDB developer data platform's best in class security, compliance, and privacy controls allows Redcliffe's team to confidently handle even the most sensitive patient data. MongoDB Atlas takes care of many of the traditional database management challenges, which means that developers can spend their time building diagnostics for patients, rather than managing databases. Redcliffe Labs is focusing on incorporating next-generation technologies in the diagnostics space with an AI platform that will make Interactive Diagnostics reports, Advanced Health Profiling and more detailed Diagnostics and Health Alerts. Industry Disruptor Cathay Pacific Cathay Pacific , Hong Kong’s home carrier operating in more than 60 destinations worldwide, has been on an impressive journey to become one of the very first airlines to create a truly paperless flight deck. Until recently, a flight from Hong Kong to New York would require a crew to review more than 150 pages of finely printed text and charts before their flight and make ongoing updates throughout the trip. In 2019, Cathay Pacific conducted the first zero paper flight, removing 50kg of manuals, charts, maps, and flight briefing paperwork. They achieved this enormous feat with the help of one seamless and highly customized iPad application: Flight Folder. Built on MongoDB Atlas, Flight Folder is designed to improve the pilot briefing experience. MongoDB helped consolidate dozens of different information sources into one place, and made it possible for flight crews to easily share their experiences with others. It also included a digital refueling feature that helps crews become much more efficient with fueling strategies – saving significant flight time and costs. The use of MongoDB Device Sync enables seamless syncing and no data loss even when the app goes on- and offline mid-flight. Since the Flight Folder launch, Cathay Pacific has completed more than 340,000 flights with full digital integration in the flight deck. In addition to the greatly improved flight crew experience, flight times have been reduced, and digital refueling saves eight minutes of ground time on average. All these efficiencies have helped the company avoid the release of 15,000 tons of carbon. From Batch to Real-Time Adani Digital Labs Adani Digital Labs is the India-based digital innovation arm of the larger Adani group. The lab’s team's mission is to create one single platform – a SuperApp called AdaniOne – to empower a billion stories in India. To address several use cases and the huge scale that will be required by the superapp, the Adani Digital team selected MongoDB Atlas as its the main transactional database that will further enhance the application. A key component of the app is how it can bring together disparate data in order to provide a single view of activity across the application. In the first process, developers had taken out the data in batches and sent it to their database However, this was too slow and unpredictable as far as business requirements are concerned. Also, the consolidated view of customer history, orders, inventory, and supply chain network updates was likely to impact their customer's ability to generate revenue. Therefore, in order to find a better solution, Adani Digital Labs built a more modern architecture in line with MongoDB. Using MongoDB's Change Streams and the data platform's native Kafka connector, they created an event-based architecture that pushes the data out in real-time for analysis. Adani Digital Labs is still in the early phases of the SuperApp's rollout and collaborating with MongoDB as its developer data platform continues to help the firm to grow and deliver insights in real time. Industry 4.0 Dongwha Founded in 1948, the Dongwha Group has evolved from a singular focus on the wood and timber industry into a global leader across a number of sectors including building materials, chemicals and media. As part of its wider digital transformation strategy, Dongwha required smarter factories that would improve and optimize their production efficiency. Dongwha built an innovative Smart Factory Software platform that collects and analyzes data to enhance quality and production management capabilities. Originally, the platform was built with the community version of MongoDB. However, in order to scale and adapt, the team recently migrated to MongoDB Atlas in the cloud. This enabled them to store large volumes in the fastest and most secure way, optimize their solution for time series data, and make it easy to run machine learning across their data. Dongwha completed the migration seamlessly, without any disruption or downtime to their factories, and it has now been launched across five different sites. Over the last year, the application has significantly increased its availability and reliability while performance has improved by as much as 6x . As they look to the future, Dongwha plans to roll out the software to more of its international factories. Digital Native myBillBook India is home to more than 60 million small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) but only a small portion of those SMBs are taking advantage of digitization and many still operate using pen and paper. In addition, many businesses in India still struggle with fluctuations in internet services, outages, and latency. FloBiz is on a mission to change that with myBillBook , a one-stop solution that helps SMBs create professional invoices, manage stock, collect payments, automate reminders through smart banking, engage with their customers, manage staff attendance and payroll and generate more than 25 business reports for accounting and decision making. The app is also mobile-first, so businesses can access them from their mobile devices and allows users to manage billing and inventory in both online and offline environments. The myBillbook app is powered by MongoDB Atlas, providing the flexible and scalable foundation for the business to do everything from building new features to performing complex analytical queries. In addition, MongoDB Realm, the mobile database within the data platform, supports offline usage and syncing to ensure there is never data loss or functionality for users due to poor internet connection. Because of its success in supporting customers with business critical operations, more than 6.5 million business owners in India are now using myBillbook for their billing, accounting, collection and business growth. Customer Focused KASIKORN Business-Technology Group Established in 1945, Kasikornbank (KBank) is one of the largest and oldest banks in Thailand. Their mission is to strive towards service excellence and empower every customer’s life and business. One of KBank’s subsidiaries, KASIKORN Business-Technology Group (KBTG) , developed a mobile banking application – MAKE by KBank. MongoDB Atlas’ flexibility and ease of development enabled MAKE’s development team to choose the best type of database for its tasks, to automate data tiering with Atlas Online Archive, and to reduce hours spent on operational maintenance. With more time to focus on delivering new innovations to customers, they created unique features like Cloud Pocket which can allocate funds into unlimited customizable pockets for separate usage. They also built Pop Pay, a feature that allows users to easily search for nearby friends and transfer money by clicking their profile picture as well as “Expense Summary" a spending analysis services that helps inform and manage users’ financial habits. As of January 2023, MAKE has acquired more than 1 million users, and increased the number of transactions in MAKE from 900,000 to more than 7.5 million in a span of one year. Massive Scale China Mobile China Mobile provides mobile voice and multimedia services via its nationwide mobile telecommunications network across mainland China and Hong Kong. It is the world's largest mobile network operator by total number of subscribers. The telecommunications leader is using MongoDB to support one of its largest and most critical push services, which sends out billing details to more than 1 billion users every month. Prior to MongoDB, the tech team relied on Oracle, but as the user numbers increased, performance degraded. Despite large investments, it was still taking too long to do basic requests like finalize and deliver bills to users. In 2019, after comprehensive testing, China Mobile migrated to MongoDB. By taking advantage of MongoDB's native sharding, they were able to improve performance by 80% and go from 50 Oracle machines, to just 12 machines for the same workload. The service now handles all current requirements and is set up to scale with future growth. With the support of MongoDB, China Mobile is growing steadily,with more than 168 million monthly users and has one of the highest customer satisfaction scores in the China Mobile group.

March 30, 2023