Korea’s Hankyoreh boosts productivity by 400% with MongoDB Atlas

INTRODUCTION

Hankyoreh, a leading voice today

As publishing becomes increasingly digital, the media industry is continuously evolving. With social media platforms such as YouTube and Instagram expanding the reach of information beyond traditional news channels, numerous media outlets—including Hankyoreh—are striving to increase their digital competitiveness.

Since its founding in 1988, Hankyoreh has a history of continuous innovation. As the first newspaper funded solely by individual citizen shareholders, the publication has served as the eyes of many readers to see the world through its commitment to truthful reporting.

In addition, Hankyoreh Media Group has been a pioneer in newspaper production. This includes the introduction of the Computerized Typesetting System (CTS), a first for Korean newspapers at the time, and being the first daily newspaper with a Korean-only horizontal writing surface (traditionally the Korean language was written vertically).

Now, in the age of digital content, Hankyoreh is transforming itself into a user-friendly news platform.

To this end, Hankyoreh is powering its digital journey with MongoDB Atlas, where it can manage everything from digital content to AI-curated news recommendation services on a single platform, creating a more engaging and richer experience for readers.

THE CHALLENGE

Relational database bottlenecks

Faced with new challenges and opportunities presented by digitalization, Hankyoreh made various efforts to adapt to the evolving media landscape. However, Hankyoreh’s legacy relational database posed a significant challenge, as it hindered the organization’s ability to quickly launch new services for readers.

To align with evolving and expanding requirements, Hankyoreh needed a platform that was capable of ingesting vast quantities of data in real time, and was fluid enough to adapt to changes as new applications were introduced or old applications were updated.

To meet the growing demand for new types of services, Hankyoreh’s Platform Technology Department first needed to store and analyze user behavior data in real time and rewrite the legacy codebase while maintaining the smooth operations of existing services. However, with the existing archaic relational database, it was challenging to execute new projects within a short time frame. Additionally, the team's lack of resources further delayed new service development.

THE SOLUTION

A 400% increase in productivity with a flexible, fast platform

As internal and external demand for new services grew, the Hankyoreh team realized it needed a database solution with increased flexibility and scalability. While seeking the optimal solution to bring flexibility into its system, the team piloted MongoDB Community in its data center. By 2022, the concept was proven and upgraded to a full-scale production deployment with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud.

The migration to MongoDB using MongoDB Sync was effortless. With an easy setup and a few clicks, MongoDB Atlas was deployed in a high availability (HA) three-node cluster configuration in 30 minutes with zero service interruption. Now MongoDB Atlas is powering a number of critical services for Hanyoreh including the outlet’s mobile app, its web services, and the weekly magazine Hankyoreh 21.

Even during special events like presidential and parliamentary elections, the predictive metrics provided by MongoDB allowed the team to anticipate and identify the cause of sudden spikes in traffic, and scale up and down clusters as needed for greater flexibility.

“By applying MongoDB’s flexible modeling to multiple reorganization projects, we have accelerated our time to market by more than 300% and improved our productivity by more than 400%,” said Jun-Seok Park, Software Engineer of Platform Technology Department at Hankyoreh. “We are notified of any issues via email or messenger, and can quickly resolve them with diverse support tools such as various metrics in the dashboard and Query Insights, and complete projects on schedule.”

MongoDB is also driving positive change by supporting seamless collaboration across departments at Hankyoreh. With MongoDB Atlas, the development team supports the media room and content planning team with data faster than ever before, enabling them to generate creative ideas and differentiate content. By closely monitoring unusual access or sudden traffic spikes, the team can quickly resolve issues with the operations team managing the servers.

“Unlike relational databases, MongoDB does not require data structures to be defined in advance, which increases the flexibility of data modeling, reduces the team’s resources for operations and management, and helps us respond quickly to business changes,” said Jun-Hee Han, Team Manager of Hankyoreh's Platform Technical Department, citing MongoDB’s flexibility and scalability as key reasons for choosing MongoDB Atlas.

Furthermore, Hankyoreh is powering its digital subscription service with MongoDB by offering various options such as articles, reporters, tags, keywords, and more. “MongoDB’s flexible and scalable data model allows us to define or modify the data structure to accommodate different subscription options without redefining the schema,” said JiHye Kim, Software Engineer in the Platform Technology Department at Hankyoreh. “When a user subscribes to a specific keyword, all related articles are delivered in real time, enabling Hankyoreh to quickly adapt to changing market needs and provide a more personalized experience for users.”

The team also credits MongoDB’s quality documentation for helping them quickly adapt MongoDB’s technology to different services within the company.

“In addition to the professional support from MongoDB Korea, the regular hands-on sessions provide training that caters to different skill levels, from users who are new to MongoDB to experienced developers,” said JiHye Kim. “Through MongoDB University and various user experience (UX) resources, we can learn more effective ways to use MongoDB products and solutions. This has helped us apply the ESR (Equality, Sort, Range) rule when writing queries, as well as advanced skills such as cluster monitoring with metric and query optimization with profiler.”

THE RESULTS

Personalized services made faster and more convenient with data

Hankyoreh is expanding its adoption of MongoDB across its news services, including revamping its search function with MongoDB Search to deliver personalized digital content.

The flexibility to use all types of unstructured data in MongoDB allows the team to create customized news services for each user. This includes applying various visual assets to articles and adding special sections to encourage reader interaction and highlight popular articles.

As part of its digital service enhancements, the publication is also considering adopting MongoDB to provide AI-powered services focused on reader convenience, such as an article summary service that combines high-quality data accumulated over the years with AI.

Hankyoreh's mission is to be a media house that acts as an honest observer of the world. The team will strengthen its cooperation with MongoDB to provide in-depth content and continue to challenge itself to consolidate its competitiveness and influence in the rapidly changing media environment.