MongoDB at the AWS Pop-Up Loft NYC

Jay Gordon
September 16, 2016 | Updated: September 29, 2022
#Community#Events#Company

Amazon Web Services recently hosted Database Architecture Week at the AWS New York City Pop-Up Loft, and the MongoDB team participated in a lively discussion on leveraging NoSQL technologies on Amazon Web Services.

MongoDB Atlas, our new hosted database as a service, fits nicely into the existing AWS ecosystem. Just like many AWS products, MongoDB Atlas is completely on demand, allowing you to conduct quick, inexpensive tests. Simply spin up a cluster in minutes and terminate it when you are finished. MongoDB Atlas, which is highly available by default, also automates MongoDB best practices, making it the easiest way to run a production workload with confidence.

The morning began with a discussion by Padma Malligarjunan, Sr. Technical Account Manager from Amazon Web Services, about NoSQL options available on the AWS Cloud Platform. Padma provided an in-depth discussion on the benefits of running production NoSQL workloads on various datastores, but provided key details on how to deploy MongoDB.

Padme focused on a number of MongoDB related subjects, but the audience was most interested in scaling, durability and best practices. Her insight gave the group a head start on a day of discussions, demos and hands-on labs.

After Padme finished, we got a chance to meet Henry Clifford, CTO of Live.xyz. Live.xyz is an app devoted to sharing information about upcoming events in your area. Henry described the large amount of event data that Live works with on a daily basis and how MongoDB Atlas is a great fit for their use case. Live.xyz also leverages our new MongoDB Connector for Spark to run Spark analytics directly on MongoDB.

By using MongoDB Atlas, Live.xyz was able to reduce the total overhead required for their DevOps team by eliminating a huge portion of their infrastructure maintenance that otherwise would have been managed internally. This reduction in day-to-day overhead increases the amount of time Live.xyz can work on new features.

After Henry spoke, I got some free time to hand out our swag and meet some existing and potential users of MongoDB Atlas, including a developer who migrated off Parse to MongoDB Atlas (with help from our newly released M123 MongoDB University course) after he needed a more reliable backend for his iOS application.

Finally, it was time for the SWAG! Our wonderful and extremely fun events coordinator Katie Moon sent me tons of these awesome Rubik's Cubes to hand out.

Want one too? No problem. MongoDB will be at the San Francisco Pop-Up loft to present information on Atlas and other great products soon. Check out the events page on our website:

Register for San Francisco Pop-Up!


About the author - Jay Gordon

*Jay is a Technical Account Manager with MongoDB and is available via our chat to discuss MongoDB Cloud Products at https://cloud.mongodb.com.

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Using MongoDB Atlas From Your Favorite Language or Framework

Developers love working with MongoDB. One reason is the flexible data model, another is that there's an idiomatic driver for just about every programming language and someone's probably already built a framework on top of MongoDB that takes care of a lot of the grunt work. With high availability and scaling built in, they can also be confident that MongoDB will continue to meet their needs as their business grows. MongoDB Atlas provides all of the features of MongoDB, without the operational heavy lifting required for any new application. MongoDB Atlas is available on demand through a pay-as-you-go model and billed on an hourly basis, letting you focus on what you do best. It’s easy to get started – use a simple GUI to select the instance size, region, and features you need (Figure 1). *Figure 1: Create MongoDB Atlas Cluster* MongoDB Atlas provides: Security features to protect access to your data Built in replication for always-on availability, tolerating complete data center failure Backups and point in time recovery to protect against data corruption Fine-grained monitoring to let you know when to scale. Additional instances can be provisioned with the push of a button Automated patching and one-click upgrades for new major versions of the database, enabling you to take advantage of the latest and greatest MongoDB features A choice of cloud providers, regions, and billing options This post provides instructions on how to use MongoDB Atlas directly from your application or how to configure your favorite framework to use it. It goes on to provide links to some worked examples for specific frameworks. Worked Examples for Specific Frameworks Detailed walkthroughs are available for specific programming languages and frameworks: Using PencilBlue with MongoDB Atlas (JavaScript, Node.js) Develop & Deploy a Node.js App to AWS Elastic Beanstalk & MongoDB Atlas (JavaScript, Node.js, Express, AWS Elastic Beanstalk) Processing Data Streams with Amazon Kinesis and MongoDB Atlas (Amazon Kinesis, JavaScript, Node.js) MongoDB Atlas as The Data Store for Apostrophe (JavaScript, Node.js) Configuring KeystoneJS to Use MongoDB Atlas (JavaSript, Express, Node.js) Getting Started with Python, PyMODM, and MongoDB Atlas (Python, PyMODM) MongoDB Atlas with Meteor: A Step-By-Step Guide External site (Meteor, JavaScript, Angular, React This list will be extended as new blog posts are produced. If your preferred language or framework isn't listed above then read on as the following, generic instructions cover most other cases. Preparing MongoDB Atlas For Your Application Launch your MongoDB cluster using MongoDB Atlas and then (optionally) create a user with read and write privileges for just the database that will be used for your application, as shown in Figure 2. *Figure 2: Creating an Application user in MongoDB Atlas* You must also add the IP address of your application server to the IP Whitelist in the MongoDB Atlas security tab (Figure 3). Note that if multiple application servers will be accessing MongoDB Atlas then an IP address range can be specified in CIDR format (IP Address/number of significant bits). *Figure 3: Add App Server IP Address(es) to MongoDB Atlas* Connecting Your Application (Framework) to MongoDB Atlas The exact way that you specify how to connect to MongoDB Atlas will vary depending on your programming language and (optionally) the framework you're using. However it's pretty universal that you'll need to provide a connection string/URI. The core of this URI can be retrieved by clicking on the CONNECT button for your cluster in the MongoDB Atlas GUI, selecting the MongoDB Drivers tab and then copying the string (Figure 4). *Figure 4: Copy MongoDB Atlas Connection String/URI* Note that this URI contains the administrator username for your MongoDB Atlas group and will connect to the admin database – you'll probably want to change that. Your final URI should look something like this: mongodb://appuser:my_password@cluster0-shard-00-00-qfovx.mongodb.net:27017,cluster0-shard-00-01-qfovx.mongodb.net:27017,cluster0-shard-00-02-qfovx.mongodb.net:27017/appdatabase?ssl=true&authSource=admin' The URI contains these components: appuser is the name of the user you created in the MongoDB Atlas UI. my_password is the password you chose when creating the user in MongoDB Atlas. cluster0-shard-00-00-qfovx.mongodb.net , cluster0-shard-00-01-qfovx.mongodb.net , & cluster0-shard-00-02-qfovx.mongodb.net are the hostnames of the instances in your MongoDB Atlas replica set (click on the "CONNECT" button in the MongoDB Atlas UI if you don't have these). 27017 is the standard MongoDB port number. appdatabase is the name of the database (schema) that your application or framework will use. Note that for some frameworks, this should be omitted and the database name configured separately – check the default configuration file or documentation for your framework to see if it's possible to provide the database name outside of the URI. To enforce security, MongoDB Atlas mandates that the ssl option is used. admin is the database that's being used to store the credentials for appuser . Check Your Application Data At this point, you should add some test data through your application and then confirm that it's being correctly stored in MongoDB Atlas. MongoDB Compass is the GUI for MongoDB, allowing you to visually explore your data and interact with your data with full CRUD functionality. The same credentials can be used to connect Compass to your MongoDB database (Figure 5). *Figure 5: Connect MongoDB Compass to MongoDB Atlas* Once connected, explore the data added to your collections (Figure 6). *Figure 6: Explore MongoDB Atlas Data Using MongoDB Compass* It is also possible to add, delete, and modify documents (Figure 7). *Figure 7: Modify a Document in MongoDB Compass* You can verify that the document has really been updated from the MongoDB shell: Cluster0-shard-0:PRIMARY> use appdatabase Cluster0-shard-0:PRIMARY> db.simples.find({ first_name: "Stephanie", last_name: "Green"}).pretty() { "_id" : ObjectId("57a206be0e8ecb0d5b5549f9"), "first_name" : "Stephanie", "last_name" : "Green", "email" : "sgreen1b@tiny.cc", "gender" : "Female", "ip_address" : "129.173.45.61", "children" : [ { "first_name" : "Eugene", "birthday" : "8/25/1985" }, { "first_name" : "Nicole", "birthday" : "12/29/1963", "favoriteColor" : "Yellow" } ] } Migrating Your Data to MongoDB Atlas This post has assumed that you're building a new application but what if you already have one, with data stored in a MongoDB cluster that you're managing yourself? Fortunately, the process to migrate your data to MongoDB Atlas (and back out again if desired) is straightforward and is described in Migrating Data to MongoDB Atlas . We offer a MongoDB Atlas Migration service to help you properly configure MongoDB Atlas and develop a migration plan. This is especially helpful if you need to minimize downtime for your application, if you have a complex sharded deployment, or if you want to revise your deployment architecture as part of the migration. Contact us to learn more about the MongoDB Atlas Migration service. Next Steps While MongoDB Atlas radically simplifies the operation of MongoDB there are still some decisions to take to ensure the best performance and reliability for your application. The MongoDB Atlas Best Practices white paper provides guidance on best practices for deploying, managing, and optimizing the performance of your database with MongoDB Atlas. The guide outlines considerations for achieving performance at scale with MongoDB Atlas across a number of key dimensions, including instance size selection, application patterns, schema design and indexing, and disk I/O. While this guide is broad in scope, it is not exhaustive. Following the recommendations in the guide will provide a solid foundation for ensuring optimal application performance. Download MongoDB Atlas Andrew is part of the MongoDB product team, responsible for building the vision, positioning and content for MongoDB’s products and services, including the analysis of market trends and customer requirements. Before joining MongoDB, Andrew was director of product management for MySQL at Oracle – with a particular focus on distributed, highly available databases. Prior to Oracle, Andrew worked in software development for telecoms with a focus on HA, in-memory, real-time databases.

September 15, 2016
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Using MongoDB Skill Scanner to Build Better Training Programs

Technology leaders know that transformation is about more than just adopting modern technologies like MongoDB. The entire organization has to rally behind change — which is no easy task. The skills that modern development teams need are evolving faster than ever, and hiring to fill skills gaps can be too time-consuming and expensive of a process for many organizations. So it’s imperative that we plan for how we want to bring our people with us on our modernization journey, and proactively upskill them on the technologies we’re betting on. Because what happens if you choose MongoDB, but your developers don’t know how to use it? CIOs know that training programs are easier said than done. EY reported that 30% of CIOs acknowledge that their training programs are ineffective, and that they’re struggling to retain talent because of it. These leaders come to us to help them build and execute their MongoDB training programs , and seek advice on two extremely common yet critical challenges: How do we get away from the less effective one-size-fits-all approach? How do we measure the ROI of our training program and connect it to business impact? How we use MongoDB Skill Scanner to overcome training challenges Our Professional Services team uses a tool called MongoDB Skill Scanner to address both of these challenges. This tool helps us provide these three benefits to our customers looking to build a training program: Improve MongoDB proficiency: Teams can use Skill Scanner to quickly and easily assess the MongoDB skill gaps of their team members and gain a comprehensive understanding of their team’s MongoDB skills baseline. Increased productivity and accuracy: When team members have a comprehensive understanding of MongoDB, they are able to work more quickly and accurately on projects, leading to increased productivity and a higher quality of work. Save time and money with targeted Training: Using Skill Scanner, customers can avoid wasting time and money on trial-and-error learning. Instead, they can focus on improving their skills in a more targeted and efficient way with right-sized training plans. By leveraging this data, our customers’ engineers can engage in the right training at the right time, targeted for their job role and specific skill shortages. When a training program is built this way, engineers maximize their knowledge retention and minimize time away from their projects. Skill Scanner includes three role-based assessments, one for developers, database administrators, and DevOps respectively. Through a series of multiple choice questions, Skill Scanner provides customers with a clear understanding of their level of expertise across a set of technical skills that are critical for success in their role. After submitting the assessment, engineers will get results in each skill area outlining if they are beginner, intermediate, or advanced. Why data-driven training programs matter We’ve learned that it’s not enough to just tell teams to go watch training videos or webinars on their own, or to place everyone in the same one-size-fits-all program. Skills gaps vary from team to team, and individual to individual. The one-size-fits-all approach of some programs may not address individual learners' needs, wasting time and making it difficult for them to acquire new skills. By using Skill Scanner, we’re able to interpret this data to help determine which training courses your team should take. But we don’t only capture this data before doing training; we use Skill Scanner again after training programs are completed to see where immediate improvements have been made. This helps technology leaders prove the impact and ROI of their training, and gives them the confidence that their teams are ready to be successful with MongoDB. Developing a Precision Learning Program To go even further, our team can work with you to build a Precision Learning Program, where we use Skill Scanner data to build learning schedules that are unique to each individual. These schedules include a variety of short, blended, learning events such as classes, technical workshops, self-paced exercises, and project coaching. We’ve seen PLP lead to higher knowledge retention and of course, measurable project results. A customer who recently concluded their PLP saw a 43% increase in knowledge retention. Getting started building a personalized training program Skill gaps aren’t a novel problem IT leaders are facing. But with new digital courses, training, and technologies, the resources to close these gaps are at your fingertips. Skill Scanner and Precision Learning Program have been specifically designed to empower teams by offering targeted training that enhances their understanding of MongoDB. These short training events are carefully crafted to close skill gaps without compromising developer productivity. We’ve seen a variety of customers use this tool to help train their team’s individual needs, from needing to upskill new hires on their teams, projects with new MongoDB products, migrating to MongoDB Atlas, and more. It also saves your business the hours developers would've wasted searching for answers (and developers don’t want to spend their time that way, either). “We need help getting from point A to point B and feel MongoDB is uniquely positioned to help” — CTO at large insurance firm If you're interested in trying out MongoDB Skill Scanner or want to explore the MongoDB Precision Learning Program further, you can reach out to your account representative or contact us directly .

June 7, 2023