October 2022 Summaries

As director of customer success at MongoDB, Katie Palmer emphasizes the company's commitment to talent development and servant leadership. When reviewing resumes, she looks for relationship-building skills, business acumen, resourcefulness, grit, determination, and teamwork. The hiring process involves a recruiter screen, conversational interview with the hiring manager, and a case study discussion with a customer success team member. The "challenge" interview requires preparing a mock onboarding meeting with a new MongoDB Atlas customer, where Palmer looks for passion for technology, strategic thinking, adaptability, and coachability. Katie encourages candidates to engage with the team and recruiters throughout the process, highlighting the importance of personal connection, curiosity, and feedback application in succeeding in the role.

Atlas Charts has added support for serverless instances and online archive data sources, allowing users to visualize two new sources of data in their visualizations. Serverless instances provide scalable resource usage without upfront provisioning costs, while online archives enable automated data tiering to optimize storage and costs. These new data sources are now natively available for visualization with zero ETL, making it easier for users to create custom dashboards and charts. The updated feature supports all cluster configurations in Atlas, offering more flexibility and control for project owners.

MongoDB is being used by manufacturing companies to turn their data into business intelligence, enabling them to become more efficient and productive organizations. The real challenge with analytics is ensuring reliable access to relevant data sets, which can be achieved through a combination of data tiering, federation, querying, and visualization. MongoDB provides various options for data tiering, including online archive, Atlas Data Lake, and federated databases, to help companies prepare their data for strategic and operational insights. The proposed methodology leverages MongoDB's different features and third-party integrations to create a single API access for BI/analytics, allowing users to save storage costs while maintaining query ability across hot and cold data. Additionally, MongoDB offers Data Federation endpoints that can be used to store results of querying federated databases instances back in MongoDB clusters or as files in S3 buckets, powering other real-time enterprise or end-user applications.

ChargeHub is a Quebec-based startup that aims to simplify the electric vehicle charging experience by providing an app that helps EV owners locate and pay for charging stations. The company uses MongoDB Atlas as its database, which provides scalability, security, and flexibility. ChargeHub's mission is to increase electric vehicle adoption by making charging easier and more accessible. With the help of MongoDB for Startups program, ChargeHub has been able to build faster and scale further.

The banking industry is undergoing a shift towards modernizing its technology architecture, driven by the need for real-time transactions and customer demands. Legacy systems are failing to support accelerated modernization, and enterprises are looking to newer technologies that can plug better capabilities into business-critical systems. Gravity9's client was struggling with performance issues in their core banking platform, Temenos 24, backed by Oracle, and offloading frequently accessed data to the Oracle database failed to give the desired edge of performance and scalability. The challenges included managing the offload platform, dealing with a non-relational data model, and migrating business logic code. Gravity9 used a digital decoupling approach to create message-driven microservices on top of the client's data, leveraging MongoDB for better scalability and flexibility. This approach allowed the client to move from the old offload system to MongoDB by building fully scalable microservices for each business domain. The use of MongoDB Atlas delivered efficiency and security in data offloading and met the desired level of performance, resolving scalability issues with on-premises systems.

MongoDB is collaborating with NVIDIA Inception to power cutting-edge startups in various industries, including AI, autonomous driving, gaming, robotics, healthcare, and more. This collaboration aims to help startups build innovative technologies faster and scale further with free resources and support. The MongoDB for Startups program provides $500 in credits, a dedicated technical advisor, co-marketing opportunities, access to the developer ecosystem, and VC partners, while NVIDIA Inception offers up to $100K in AWS cloud credits, technical training, product discounts, co-marketing, customer introductions, and VC exposure.

The document database model in MongoDB requires proper data modeling to take into account constraints such as network and hard disc speed, maximum file size of documents, and features that may be added later. The optimal grouping of objects into collections is determined by the workload, and a three-phase process involving the workload, relationships, and optimization patterns can help determine the best data modeling approach. Data access patterns, such as storing related data together, are crucial in MongoDB, which allows for efficient read-write performance when properly designed schemas are used. Techniques like referencing and embedding can be employed to model complex data relationships, while a well-designed schema can reduce computation, I/O, and contention, making it easier to filter and retrieve data with minimal overhead.

MongoDB has partnered with Microsoft to offer MongoDB Atlas on Azure Marketplace, providing a frictionless process for developers to access the leading multi-cloud developer data platform. With this new listing, customers can pay-as-you-go and only pay for the resources they use, without upfront commitment required. The offering includes production-grade security features, global high availability, support for any class of workload, and seamless integrations with PowerApps, PowerAutomate, PowerBI, Synapse, and Purview. Developers can start with a free trial and scale up as needed, with the option to apply existing Azure committed spend to their Atlas usage. The partnership provides a streamlined procurement and billing experience, allowing users to get started with MongoDB Atlas on Microsoft Azure Marketplace today.

Nolan Lum, a senior software engineer at MongoDB's Atlas Search team, discusses her career journey and experiences within the team, which focuses on integrating relevance-based search capabilities into applications. She highlights the collaborative and inclusive culture at MongoDB, particularly emphasizing mentorship and diversity, which has helped her grow professionally. Nolan worked on the Resumable Initial Sync feature to enhance replication processes, ensuring a seamless user experience with MongoDB. The Atlas Search team tackles a variety of challenges, from product development to technical problem-solving, allowing engineers to engage in diverse projects. The leadership structure at MongoDB empowers engineers by combining managerial and technical roles, fostering a supportive environment. Additionally, MongoDB's CEO, Dev Ittycheria, announced his decision to retire in 2025, with Chirantan “CJ” Desai named as his successor. This transition aims to bring fresh perspectives as MongoDB continues to leverage its strengths in the evolving tech landscape, particularly in AI and data-intensive applications. Dev reflects on his tenure, expressing confidence in MongoDB's future and the new leadership's ability to guide the company to greater heights.

The Atlas Search Team Empowers Engineers: Meet Nolan Lum is about a senior software engineer, Nolan Lum, who works on the Atlas Search team at MongoDB. She shares her experience of growing her career in the engineering team and working on search-related challenges. The team tackles various projects, including optimizing data consistency and providing guarantees on what data users read back from the database. Nolan likes working on the team because it offers a collaborative environment with opportunities for traditional engineering, product challenges, hard technical problems, and more. She appreciates the leadership's focus on empowering engineers to succeed and giving them space to do so. The company values diversity, inclusivity, and equal retention of employees, which has helped her feel comfortable being herself at work. Nolan was impressed by MongoDB's approach to measuring performance and its fair culture during the hiring process, leading her to accept an offer and grow her career in the organization.

Skunkworks 2022 was a week-long hackathon event at MongoDB where engineers had the freedom to work on side projects, proof of concepts, or anything else imaginable. The event was inspired by MongoDB's values of "Think Big, Go Far" and "Build Together." With over 115 projects submitted, this year's Star Trek-themed event was one of the best and largest hackathons yet. Engineers worked on various projects such as Charts Slack Integration, MongoDB Carbon Footprint Calculation, Atlas Static Site Search, and Simulating Common Customer Workloads. The Skunkworks hackathon provides a creative outlet for engineers, allows them to explore new ideas, and helps build a meritocratic culture where any project can receive recognition and reward. It also improves engineers as individuals by providing a break from the standard work week and allowing them to work on whatever they want, whether it's a solo project or helping to make someone's dream a reality.

Thunkable is a no-code platform that makes it easy to build custom native mobile apps without requiring advanced software engineering knowledge or certifications. The platform has seen tremendous growth, expanding to over three million users and partnering with MongoDB for its data management needs. Thunkable democratizes mobile app development, empowering innovators from diverse backgrounds to create solutions without writing code. The company uses a drag-and-drop design canvas and logic blocks to facilitate app creation, while MongoDB provides scalable data storage and management capabilities. Thunkable benefits from the MongoDB for Startups program, which offers free MongoDB Atlas credits, one-on-one technical support, co-marketing opportunities, and access to its partner network.

MongoDB Employees Share Their Coming Out Stories: (Inter)national Coming Out Day 2022` The company MongoDB celebrates `International Coming Out Day`, a day that marks the anniversary of National Coming Out Day, and features its employees who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community sharing their coming out experiences. The event aims to promote visibility, education, and representation of the community, highlighting the importance of allies in creating an inclusive space. Employees from various teams and departments share their personal stories, emphasizing the significance of coming out as a transformative experience that can lead to greater self-awareness and understanding. The company's values of Embracing Differences and Building Together are showcased through this initiative, which encourages employees to come together and support one another in living authentically.

The MongoDB and Google partnership has gained momentum in the past six months, with the launch of a pay-as-you-go Atlas service on Google Cloud Marketplace. This offering provides developers with a simplified subscription experience and gives enterprises more freedom to run MongoDB on Google Cloud. The two companies have integrated their managed services to help customers make data smarter, more intuitive, and easier to use. They've combined real-time, operational, and embedded analytics to deliver best-in-class application-level analytics. Integrations have been made with Google BigQuery, Vertex AI, and other data services to bring the power of machine learning/AI expertise to MongoDB data. Developers can access a reference architecture and demo for retail and finance fraud detection scenarios. The partnership has also ensured a simple, intuitive developer experience through integrations with Cloud Run, Vercel, Apigee, and more. Additionally, MongoDB Enterprise Advanced is now available on Google Cloud Marketplace, offering self-management freedom to developers.

Serverless architecture is growing rapidly due to its benefits such as abstracting away infrastructure management and provisioning, allowing developers to focus on building differentiating features and creating great app experiences. The concept of serverless has evolved from virtualization to containerization to cloud computing, with early iterations having limitations such as cold starts and resource restrictions. Today's serverless solutions have overcome these issues and offer traits like no server management, flexible scaling, pay for value, high availability, and event-driven workflows. While developers still need to learn how to use the services, serverless is expected to be the future of app development due to its ability to spin up independent stacks without worrying about other services running on them. MongoDB Atlas Serverless has been announced as a general availability solution that delivers fast and responsive databases with consumption-based pricing and cloud flexibility.

The 2023 MongoDB APAC Innovation Awards are now open for nominations, recognizing organizations in the Asia-Pacific region that are using data and technology to innovate and enhance their businesses. The awards program aims to celebrate companies that embody the innovative spirit and demonstrate a high correlation between innovation and profitability. Winners will receive various recognition and opportunities, including a physical trophy, feature story on MongoDB.com, and participation in webinars and media events. Nominations are open until November 1, 2022, and can be submitted through the official website.

The 2023 MongoDB APAC Innovation Awards are open for nominations, celebrating organizations in the Asia-Pacific region that excel in leveraging MongoDB for pioneering data-driven innovations. The awards recognize achievements in various categories, including customer experience, societal impact, real-time data processing, industry disruption, health tech solutions, organizational transformation, digital growth, and search capabilities. Winners will receive a trophy, be featured on MongoDB's website and press releases, and have opportunities for media engagement. In a related update, MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria announced his retirement, effective November 2025, with Chirantan "CJ" Desai set to succeed him. Ittycheria highlighted that the leadership transition aims to bring fresh perspectives for MongoDB’s next phase of growth, emphasizing Desai’s extensive experience in scaling companies like ServiceNow and Cloudflare. This transition is part of MongoDB's strategic plan to harness the rise of AI and data-intensive applications, with Ittycheria remaining on the Board to ensure a seamless handover.

Honoring Latine Heritage Month at MongoDB is a celebration of the diverse backgrounds and experiences of the company's employees, particularly those from Latin American heritage. The article features two employees, Tayrin S Riojas, Head of Government Relations and Public Policy, and Adriano Fratelli, Customer Success Manager, who share their personal stories and how their cultural heritage shapes their work at MongoDB. Both employees highlight the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, citing the company's inclusive culture as a key factor in their success. They also discuss the opportunities that working at MongoDB has provided for them, including career growth and exposure to new technologies and cultures. The article concludes by emphasizing the value of embracing differences and creating a welcoming environment for employees from diverse backgrounds.

The MongoDB Data Analytics team has grown significantly since Chris Douglas joined two and a half years ago, tripling in size while increasing maturity, complexity, and depth of work. The team has invested heavily in telemetry to better understand developers' journeys and help them get the most out of MongoDB. As a result, they have been able to empower data-driven culture across the company, collaborating closely with various functions such as sales, marketing, and product to make better decisions. The team's focus on experimentation, A/B testing, and contextualizing user behavior has helped create value for customers and drive innovation. Working in analytics at MongoDB is exciting due to its unique blend of startup culture and larger company advantages, fostering a collaborative and creative environment where team members can shape the future roadmap of products and make an impact on users' daily experiences.