Playback: How Cisco Migrated a Mission-Critical Application to MongoDB - MongoDB World 2018

Dj Walker-Morgan
March 28, 2019 | Updated: May 15, 2019
#Customer Stories#Events

Playback is where the MongoDB blog brings you selected talks from around the world and around the industry. Here, we continue showcasing some of the informative talks from MongoDB World 2018 like this one from Cisco.

How do you migrate from an RDBMS to MongoDB and get a 5x improvement in performance? In this presentation, Managing a Mission Critical eCommerce Application on MongoDB: Architecture, Cisco's Rama Arumugam and Nayeem Khaja talk about how they did just that.

Watch the talk and you'll get an insight into what's involved in migrating a mission-critical application from an RDBMS to MongoDB, how to stay live as you migrate, how to optimize your data for the document model and how to mitigate risks around the process.

The Cisco team chose MongoDB as the foundation for their new platform to get away from the monolithic RDBMS configuration. MongoDB allowed them to get zero downtime upgrades and deployments whilst simultaneously improving their application performance and developer agility.

The migration was carried out by building a parallel configuration of the application that used MongoDB. Data was then live-synchronized into MongoDB with Cisco's own, now open-sourced synchronization application. The resulting system was then tested for IO and performance with the results fed back so document models and indices could be appropriately tuned. For example, one application saw its 14 RDBMS tables reduced to one collection and 60 indexes reduced to 7 indexes. But even with that level of change, the overall eCommerce platform architecture wasn't changed. Only the backend, database handling was reworked to accommodate MongoDB.

The result of this work - 14 months of the system being up with zero downtime, through many upgrades and updates, a 5x performance improvement with response times shrunk from 3-5 seconds to less than a second over the previous implementation and around 120,000 fewer lines of code in the system. Watch the presentation to find out more.


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