August 2022 Summaries

Alloy Automation uses no-code integrations to automate ecommerce services such as CRM, logistics, subscriptions, and databases. The company is part of the MongoDB for Startups program, which provides Atlas credits among other benefits for young companies. Alloy leverages MongoDB Atlas as its underlying database due to its freeform nature in handling JSON data from connected apps. By partnering with MongoDB, Alloy overcomes startup challenges such as managing technical resources and compliance requirements. The integration between Alloy and MongoDB enables bidirectional sync, allowing users to pull and push data between platforms. As a member of the MongoDB for Startups program, Alloy enjoys access to a range of resources, including free credits to MongoDB Atlas and personalized technical advice.

There are several reasons to use MongoDB's improved time series collections, including their purpose-built design for handling the challenges of time series data, the ability to keep everything in house in one data platform, and logical ways to organize and access time series data. This is achieved through features such as columnar storage, efficient query rewrites, and densification and gap filling capabilities. These capabilities enable developers to build efficient algorithms, such as those used in algorithmic trading and IoT applications, where real-time data analysis and processing are critical. MongoDB's developer data platform also addresses challenges associated with time series use cases, including scalability, change streams, and functions, making it an ideal choice for organizations looking to work with time series data.

Lovisa Berggren is a software engineering intern at MongoDB's Dublin office, where she is working on improving the release tool and gaining hands-on experience. She has been thoroughly enjoying her time at MongoDB, citing the company's culture as one of its greatest assets - everyone is kind, welcoming, and helpful, making her feel like a valued member of the team. Lovisa's internship experience has allowed her to work on real-world projects, learn about legacy code maintenance and release processes, and gain valuable skills in a collaborative environment with supportive colleagues. The company's emphasis on its engineering culture has enabled her growth as an intern, making her excited to return to work every day and feel appreciated by the team.

MongoDB is expanding its presence in the Asia-Pacific region, with a focus on South Korea, which it anticipates will see high growth. The company's sales team in South Korea works cross-functionally to make an impact and drive business growth. MongoDB's organizational culture is horizontal, emphasizing collaboration and open communication among team members. The company has hundreds of customers in South Korea, including well-known brands, and is at a great spot within the market. Despite its success, MongoDB still needs to find and research customers' pain points to deliver value. The Korean database market is growing rapidly, offering enormous possibilities for the company. Joining the sales ecosystem in Korea can provide extraordinary career growth opportunities.

지금이 MongoDB Korea와 함께할 절호의 기회다. 국내 시장은 향후 1~2년 내에 더 높은 성장을 기대하고 있으며, MongoDB는 아시아 태평양 지역에서 주목받고 있습니다. 국내 고객들은 MongoDB 한국 지사의 전문가들로부터 한국어로 소통하며 직접 현지 직원의 지원을 받고 싶어합니다. MongoDB는 다양한 직군과 직위의 사람들이 자유롭게 소통하고 의견을 공유하는 수平적인 조직 문화를 가지고 있습니다. 현재 국내 시장에서 가장 좋은 위치에 있다고 볼 수 있으며, 이미 국내 수백개 이상의 고객을 보유하고 있으며, 그 중에는 KBS, 카카오페이, 배달의 민족, 그리고 전통적인 조직과 디지털 네이티브 등 다양한 조직에 걸쳐 수많은 고객이 있습니다. MongoDB 한국 지사는 현재 엄청난 속도로 성장하고 있으며, 시장의 많은 인재들이 함께한다면 아마 빠르게 성장해 나가는 걸 몸소 느낄 수 있으며 자신 또한 많이 발전할 수 있는 기회를 갖게 될 것입니다.

To break the bias surrounding women in technology, companies can focus on retention by offering benefits and creating inclusive environments that support women's career advancement. Men also play a crucial role in breaking biases and stereotypes for women, as they can provide mentorship and advocacy to help overcome imposter syndrome. Introducing girls to coding and technology at a young age through programs like Girls Who Code can also make a significant difference in promoting female potential. Companies should prioritize diversity and inclusion by measuring performance reviews and core company values, while parents can support gender equality by introducing their daughters to non-traditional toys and activities. International Women's Day serves as a reminder of the importance of inclusivity and empowerment for women, allowing them to take control of their careers and realize their potential.

MongoDB continues to grow its corporate sales team in Europe and the Middle East, with a goal of securing net new accounts in organizations of up to 1,500 employees. The company's corporate account executives work directly with CTOs, Engineering/IT leaders, and technical end users to drive and build solutions that serve the best interests of their customers. Two corporate account executives, Sophie Gruber and Tyconor Chan, share their experiences on career progression, development, and enablement within MongoDB. Both Sophie and Tyconor highlight the company's emphasis on merit-based career progression, personal and professional development, and a supportive culture that encourages collaboration and teamwork. They also praise the company's sales enablement program, which provides new hires with a two-week upskill bootcamp and Advanced Sales Training to refine their skills. MongoDB offers several open roles across its teams globally for those looking to make an impact and transform their careers.

### Digital Underwriting: Riding the Insurance Transformation Wave With MongoDB Digital underwriting is transforming the insurance industry by leveraging data and artificial intelligence to streamline processes, reduce manual work, and improve decision-making. To achieve this, organizations must adopt a modern IT trend of using microservices, API-first, cloud-based, and headless architecture principles, enabling developers to build services that can be used across multiple business workflows and applications. MongoDB plays a pivotal role in disrupting the industry by providing a developer data platform that allows insurers to tame complexity, increase productivity, and support MACH principles. With its flexible document model, containerized application management, real-time automation of workflows, and business agility using DevOps methodologies, MongoDB enables insurers to integrate legacy siloed data into a single view, manage the full lifecycle of applications, automate workflows leveraging events in real-time, and work quickly with complex data, ultimately streamlining their underwriting processes.

Telco companies face increasing pressure from customers who expect seamless service that is always-on and intuitive. To meet these challenges, telcos are adopting modern data platforms that utilize AI and machine learning to automate end-to-end network operations, including network security, fraud mitigation, and customer experience. These platforms help reduce data complexity by providing a single source of truth and increasing service assurance through automation. They also enable network intelligence and automation, making it easier for engineers to track and manage configuration changes in real-time. Additionally, the use of TM Forum Open APIs provides a standard interface for exchanging telco data models, allowing organizations to develop new microservices quickly and efficiently. By adopting these modern approaches, telcos can improve their network performance and reliability, meet customer expectations, and remain competitive in today's market.

The industry is shifting towards sustainability as a primary consideration in database architecture. Cloud migration can lead to an 84% reduction in carbon emissions. Selecting serverless databases, consolidating platforms, and strategizing around prevention are key steps to reduce the carbon footprint of databases. Implementing smaller changes, such as data transfer optimization and energy-efficient deployment, can also make a significant impact over time. The time to act is now, as studies estimate that 2-4% of global emissions come from the IT industry, with data centers being a major contributor to this problem.

MongoDB is partnering with IONOS to help European organizations in regulated industries move their data to the cloud, aligning with security, compliance, and sovereignty requirements. This partnership aims to provide a platform for developers to build, deploy, and run applications securely, while keeping control of their data. With over 100K servers across 16 data centers, IONOS has a strong footprint in public sector and regulated industries where cloud usage is constrained by compliance or data sovereignty needs. The collaboration will offer both Enterprise Advanced and Community versions of MongoDB with IONOS, supporting customers during implementation.

Trust and collaboration are key components of the MongoDB internship program, enabling interns like Erin McNulty to grow as engineers and take on new challenges. With a supportive environment that encourages curiosity and intellectual humility, interns can explore different types of software engineering and develop their working styles. The company's strong culture prioritizes collaboration, with engineers often asking questions about each other's projects and contributing to discussions. This culture has allowed Erin to thrive in her internship, trying new things and learning from her experiences, ultimately growing as an engineer who is responsible for design and execution.

The MongoDB Diversity Scholarship program is an initiative that supports members of underrepresented groups in technology by providing complimentary access to the MongoDB World developer conference, on-demand access to MongoDB University for free certification preparation, and mentorship via an exclusive discussion group. This year's cohort of scholars had opportunities to interact with company leadership at a luncheon and share their experiences in a public panel discussion. Scholars from diverse backgrounds shared their personal stories, inspirations, and advice for pursuing STEM fields. They highlighted the impact of MongoDB World on their learning and career paths, citing the conference as a source of inspiration, networking opportunities, and skills development. The program aims to foster diversity, inclusion, and community engagement in the tech industry by empowering underrepresented groups to pursue careers in technology.

The MongoDB Diversity Scholarship program aims to support underrepresented groups in the tech industry by providing access to the MongoDB World developer conference, MongoDB University for certification, and mentorship opportunities. Scholars such as Rebecca Hayes, Delphine Nyaboke, Raja Adil, Evans Asuboah, and Daniel Erbynn shared their experiences, highlighting impactful interactions at the conference, breakout sessions, and networking opportunities that inspired them to pursue careers in STEM fields. They emphasized the importance of continuous learning, networking, embracing uniqueness, and contributing to societal change through technology. The program has motivated participants to explore MongoDB's capabilities and apply their knowledge to real-world applications, fostering a sense of community and encouraging them to become leaders in their respective fields.

AWS and MongoDB are partners in providing reliable, resilient cloud environments through a shared responsibility model, where security responsibilities fall on both the business and the public cloud provider. When deploying MongoDB Atlas on AWS, customers are responsible for securing everything above the application layer, while AWS operates, manages, and controls the database infrastructure below that level. The partnership aims to simplify data security, allowing customers to focus on developing great applications and user experiences. MongoDB is committed to delivering secure solutions through innovation, such as queryable encryption, and offers a cloud-based service that is trusted by organizations with sensitive workloads.

The new "More Like This" feature in MongoDB Atlas Search allows developers to easily build more relevant and engaging experiences for their end users by displaying documents that are similar to a result document. The feature uses term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) to extract representative terms from a reference document or documents, returning a set of similar documents. With "More Like This," developers can define what constitutes sufficient similarity for their use cases, controlling variables such as the number of query terms selected and minimum and maximum document frequency thresholds. The feature is suitable for various use cases, including e-commerce, content management systems, application search, or anywhere user engagement is desired.

A common misconception about security that hackers hope you don't know is that NoSQL databases, such as MongoDB, are not vulnerable to SQL injection attacks because they do not use SQL. However, this is incorrect, and hackers have developed tools like NoSQLmap to exploit vulnerabilities in NoSQL applications. Another misconception is that authentication is only necessary for public networks, but social engineering attacks can be used to gain access even when the network is private. Additionally, many people believe that encryption at rest will protect their data from hackers, but this is not always the case, as key management interoperability protocols are often overlooked. Finally, malicious insiders, such as employees who may accept a job with a competitor and bring sensitive information with them, pose a significant risk to businesses. Using secure by default configurations, like those provided by MongoDB Atlas, can help mitigate these risks.

MongoDB Atlas is used in conjunction with Apache Kafka and MQTT protocol for data streaming and real-time analytics in the industrial internet of things (IIoT) sector. MongoDB's time series collections are utilized to efficiently store and process large volumes of time-series data, allowing for real-time operational data-driven applications and analytics. The combination of MQTT + Kafka + MongoDB enables the seamless movement of data from IoT devices to a cloud-based environment, where it can be processed and analyzed in real-time. Additionally, MongoDB Atlas provides features such as Online Archive to optimize costs by storing "cold" data in cheaper storage while maintaining queryability. This setup allows for the creation of real-time dashboards and analytics using tools like Atlas Charts.

The discovery of supply chain vulnerabilities, such as the Solar Winds cyberattack and the Log4j security flaw, has brought attention to the need for organizations to protect themselves against these threats. Few organizations have complete transparency into their software supply chain, which includes third-party dependencies, open source scripts, contractors, and other components involved in developing an application. To address this issue, MongoDB has implemented various safeguards throughout its software development life cycle, including testing, securing third-party software, using security tools to scan source code, and promoting the use of software bills of materials (SBOMs) to provide visibility into individual components and dependencies. By taking these measures, organizations can improve their software supply chain security and protect themselves against vulnerabilities that malicious actors may exploit.

The traditional financial systems of many banks are built on outdated relational databases that struggle to handle the demands of modern digital payments, such as instantaneous and cashless transactions. These systems are ill-equipped to provide scalability, performance, and real-time customer experiences due to their complex tabular structure, which requires frequent reorganization and can lead to data management issues. A document database model offers a more flexible and efficient alternative by eliminating the need for intricate tables and allowing for easy modification of fields without disrupting migrations. This allows for intuitive development work, scalability, resiliency, locality, and workload isolation, making it an ideal solution for modern payment systems.

Introducing the Ability to Independently Scale Analytics Node Tiers for MongoDB Atlas | MongoDB Blog` MongoDB Atlas now offers analytics node tiers, providing greater control and flexibility by allowing developers to customize their infrastructure for analytical workloads. This new feature enables teams to choose an analytics node tier larger or smaller than operational nodes in their cluster, ensuring optimal performance for both transactional and analytical queries without over-provisioning the entire cluster. With this added customization, users can scale up or down based on their specific analytics needs, choosing a higher or lower tier as required, which helps optimize cost savings.

Canva, a visual communication platform empowering millions of users worldwide, faced significant data challenges as it scaled from tens of terabytes to tens of billions of documents. To overcome these challenges, Canva adopted MongoDB Atlas, leveraging its flexible document model and horizontal scaling capabilities through sharding. After initial success, the company encountered issues with metadata updates causing latency spikes and disk contention, which were addressed by merging chunks, implementing locally attached disks, and maintaining a thorough incident review process. The experience highlights the importance of flexibility, uniform chunk distribution, reliability, and collaboration in achieving massive scale and ensuring a seamless user experience.

### Implementing Zero Trust Security with MongoDB MongoDB offers several tools and features to integrate its products into a zero trust environment. The practice of protecting IT environments from unauthorized access has shifted from perimeter security to the concept of zero trust, where every user, device, and connection must be continually verified and audited. MongoDB provides security by default, multiple forms of authentication, TLS and SSL encryption, X.509 security certificates, role-based access control (RBAC), database authentication logs, and field-level encryption for data in motion, at rest, and in use. Additionally, MongoDB Atlas offers queryable encryption for improved protection of sensitive data. The company's cloud-based database is secure by default, with features such as IP access lists, bastion hosts, multifactor authentication, and SSH key requirements. Logging and auditing capabilities allow administrators to monitor their zero trust environment and ensure compliance and reporting. Overall, MongoDB is optimally suited for use within a zero trust environment, providing industry-leading capabilities in access, authorization, and encryption.