Legacy Modernization with MongoDB and Confluent

In many organizations, crucial enterprise data is locked in dozens or hundreds of silos that may be, controlled by different teams, and stuck in systems that aren’t able to serve new workloads or access patterns. This is a blocker for innovation and insight ultimately hampering the business. For example, imagine building a new mobile app for your customers that enables them to view their account data in a single view. Designing the app could require months of time to simply navigate the internal processes necessary to gain access to the legacy systems and even more time to figure out how to integrate them.

An Operational Data Layer, or ODL, can offer a “best of both worlds” approach, providing the benefits of modernization without the risk of a full rip and replace. Legacy systems are left intact – at least at first – meaning that existing applications can continue to work as usual without interruption. New or improved data consumers will access the ODL rather than the legacy data stores, protecting those stores from new workloads that may strain their capacity and expose single points of failure. At the same time, building an ODL offers a chance to redesign the application’s data model, allowing for new development and features that aren’t possible with the rigid tabular structure of existing relational systems. With an ODL, it’s possible to combine data from multiple legacy sources into a single repository where new applications, such as a customer single view or artificial intelligence processes, can access the entire corpus of data. Existing workloads can gradually shift to the ODL, delivering value at each step. Eventually, the ODL can be promoted to a system of record and legacy systems can be decommissioned. Read our blog covering DaaS with MongoDB and Confluent to learn more.

There’s also a push today for applications and databases to be entirely cloud-based, but the reality is that current business applications are often too complex to be migrated easily or completely. Instead, many businesses are opting to move application data between on-premises and cloud deployments in an effort to leverage the full advantage of public cloud computing without having to undertake a complete, massive data lift-and-shift.

Confluent can be used for both one-time and real-time data synchronization between legacy data sources and modern data platforms like MongoDB, whose fully managed global cloud database service, MongoDB Atlas, is supported across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Confluent Platform can be self-managed in your own data center while Confluent Cloud can be used on the public clouds.

Whether leaving your application on-premise is a personal choice or a corporate mandate, there are many good reasons to integrate with MongoDB Atlas.

  • Bring your data closer to your users in more than 70 regions with Atlas’s global clusters
  • Address your most intense workloads with one-click, automated sharding for scale out and zero-downtime scale up
  • Quickly provision TBs of database storage, all on high performance SSDs with dedicated I/O bandwidth
  • Natively query and analyze data across AWS S3 and MongoDB Atlas with MongoDB Atlas Data Lake
  • Perform full-text search queries with MongoDB Atlas Search
  • Build native mobile applications that seamlessly synchronize data with MongoDB Realm
  • Create powerful visualizations and dashboards of your MongoDB data with MongoDB Charts
  • Off-load older data to cost effective storage with MongoDB Atlas Online Archive

In this video we will show one time migration and Real time continuous data synchronization from a Relational System to MongoDB Atlas using Confluent Platform and the MongoDB Connector for Apache Kafka. Also we will be talking about different ways to store and consume the data within MongoDB Atlas. Git repository for the demo is here. Learn more about the MongoDB and Confluent partnership here and download the joint Reference Architecture here.

Click here to learn more about modernizing to MongoDB.