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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Building a Culture of Growth: SVP Simon Eid on MongoDB's Massive Opportunity in APAC

Simon Eid is Senior Vice President Asia-Pacific (APAC) at MongoDB and leads the sales teams across Australia and New Zealand, India, ASEAN, and Japan. Simon's go-to-market organisation in APAC is growing rapidly and has nearly tripled in size in the past three years. They are hiring in all regions . In this article, Simon discusses MongoDB’s opportunity in APAC and how he builds a culture of growth and accountability. Simon Eid, SVP APAC, MongoDB (left) and Anoop Dhankar, RVP ANZ, MongoDB (right) MongoDB's opportunity in Asia-Pacific Out of the top 13 economies by GDP in the world , five of them are located in APAC: China, Japan, Australia, India, and South Korea. And that's to say nothing of the ASEAN countries which alone have more than 650 million inhabitants. Combine this with the worldwide database market, one of the largest markets in the software industry. IDC estimates that it will grow to $137B in 2027, and MongoDB has just reached $1B in ARR. This gives you a sense of the massive market opportunity we have globally. Regardless of industry, product, or service, almost every company is becoming a technology company, which means that every company is becoming a data company. We believe MongoDB is the Developer Data Platform that is best placed to support and accelerate that trend. We’ve already captured thousands of customers around the globe, but it’s important to keep in mind that our world is still in the early stages of shifting to the cloud and changing how applications are built and run. Compared to other software, what's special about the market we play in is that the database is not a “nice-to-have”; it’s mission-critical for organisations. As our world continues to undergo this digital transformation, we have the opportunity to transform how our customers use software and data to innovate, create, and disrupt industries. For example, look at Cathay Pacific , Hong Kong's home airline carrier operating in more than 60 destinations worldwide. The company's digital team turned to MongoDB on their journey to become one of the first airlines to create a truly paperless flight deck. Flight Folder, their application built on MongoDB, consolidates dozens of different information sources into one place. Since the Flight Folder launch, Cathay Pacific has completed more than 340,000 flights with full digital integration in the flight deck. Their innovation is enabled by MongoDB. Building a team across regions and cultures Our team in APAC is unique because of the different markets and cultures within the region. What this means is that we go to market differently in India than we do in Australia, in Singapore than we do in South Korea, and so on. Each market is completely different, but within all of them, there is a huge opportunity. Different from many of our peers, in APAC we've established business leaders who run regionalized teams in India, ASEAN, and ANZ with all functions reporting to them. These teams essentially operate as their own business and implement local best practices into their strategy. But, it doesn’t mean they’re operating in a silo. At the leadership level, there is an immense amount of collaboration and sharing of experiences to identify what’s working and what isn’t within each region. We also have a fantastic global sales organisation that rolls out extensive training and best practices to help enable our local teams to best help our customers and grow the business. Members of our APAC team at a recent offsite in Phuket Culture The most important thing is culture. We have a very high standard around everything we do and how we interact with each other. We don’t entertain politics. You can teach someone new skills and coach them on how to be successful in a new role, but if they’re not aligned with the culture, they will not be a fit. It’s a non-negotiable for me and why the most important aspect of the hiring process is the cultural aspect. If you get the culture right, everything else starts to fall into place. What I hear at MongoDB and from the teams I've built at other companies is that this is the kind of culture they can really thrive and grow. At MongoDB, our culture is defined and shaped by six core values . One of the values that’s most important to my team is “Embrace the Power of Differences”. Within APAC, there are a variety of cultural identities and nuances that can often be difficult to navigate, whether it is cultural values, beliefs, or go-to-market strategy. It’s important that everyone who joins my team is respectful of each other’s regional culture. What we’ve done within the APAC region, and with teams across the globe, is take everyone on a journey to understand and embrace these cultural differences. Our role as leaders is to develop our teams, from the bottom all the way up, which is part of MongoDB’s BDR to CRO career development initiative. We need to develop the next wave of leaders so that they’re prepared to step up when the time comes. For APAC, this means that regardless of where someone is from, each team member has been coached and developed on the cultural nuances so that they can lead people and go to market in each of the different regions. It’s also important that each team member contributes to a culture of psychological safety. Being part of a high-growth tech company requires taking risks and making mistakes. We have a high standard and we hold each other accountable, but it never comes at the cost of creating an environment where people are afraid to fail. When someone faces setbacks, I encourage them to share those experiences so that we can collectively learn. Through mutual support, we foster a stronger team capable of delivering exceptional results. The future of MongoDB in Asia-Pacific For any organisation to be successful, I believe it’s critically important for the entire ecosystem to act as one. As I mentioned earlier, at MongoDB the whole country ecosystem is aligned around one set of goals, so it's not a case of different teams running off in different directions. The teams are willing to lean in and do what's required to help each other build a great business. I can confidently say that in APAC, we are one team. This means sales, marketing, customer success, solutions consulting, and professional services all working together to focus on three things: making customers successful, building technical champions, and driving new workloads. As we continue to grow our team and MongoDB’s footprint in the region, these are the three things that will drive our success. As I mentioned earlier, there's a huge opportunity for MongoDB in APAC. Despite hiring slowing down or stopping completely at many other organisations, we're continuing to invest heavily in the region. To give you a sense of that - we've nearly tripled the size of our APAC go-to-market team in the past three years, and we've got more open roles across the different functions and regions. If you want to be part of this journey, there are three things I want to reiterate: First, we are extremely passionate about our culture, from the field level up to the leadership level. As a team, this is the brand we bring to the market. Second, the opportunity here is massive based on the total addressable market and our current share. And third, we place critical importance on development. By joining this team, I can promise that you’ll be provided with countless opportunities to develop your career and make an impact. I’m confident in my team and the leadership we have in place who are ready to take MongoDB APAC to the next level. Join us !

September 28, 2023