Just as no year is complete for me without a viewing of Blazing Saddles, no Red Hat Summit is complete without a talk with someone from MongoDB.
We therefore posed a few questions for Paul Cross, Vice President of Solutions Architecture at MongoDB, and here’s what he had to say.
Roger: Tell us about the latest at MongoDB. Growth? Company direction?
Paul: A lot has happened at MongoDB in the past few months. Just after passing 1,000 subscribers and over 500 customers of our fully managed backup service, we announced MongoDB 2.6, our biggest release ever.
It includes major updates to our management application, MMS, including continuous incremental backup, point-in-time recovery, and automation. We are especially excited about the automation capabilities — users will be able to create MongoDB systems of any size and topology, with a single button click. They’ll also be able to manage their systems, including scale out, and hot upgrades with no downtime to their apps.
This is consistent with a major focus for us now – make MongoDB as easy to operate at massive scale as it is to build applications.
We have also added advanced security to MongoDB, putting it ahead of all other NoSQL products, in our opinion, and more importantly making MongoDB supported for critical apps in banks, healthcare organizations, federal agencies and other industries that require strict security.
Roger: How are you doing with developers?
Paul: Developers love MongoDB. We are now well past 7 million downloads of the database — and MMS is incredibly popular in the community, with over 35,000 users. We think the new enhancements to MMS and MongoDB will be well received in the community because they allow users to focus on what differentiates their business from their competitors.
Roger: And customers?
Paul: Tens of thousands of organizations use MongoDB, including 30 Fortune 100 companies. Significant customers include Cisco, eBay, MetLife and Forbes, and just this week Silver Spring Networks announced they are using MongoDB to scale its real-time Grid Data Platform. We are constantly announcing new customers; more recent announcements are available here and information on our customers can be found here.
Roger: You have an event coming up soon as well…
Paul: MongoDB will be holding MongoDB World this June, which will feature more than 80 in-depth sessions, including speakers from Bouygues Telecom, Citigroup, Expedia, Genentech, LinkedIn and Sanofi-Aventis. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and Cloudera Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Mike Olson will also deliver keynote addresses.
Roger: I have a theory that all the world is hybrid cloud, or will be soon. How strongly do you agree/disagree with this?
Paul: From day one, MongoDB was designed for the cloud and will run optimally on any cloud deployments, with commodity hardware leveraged en masse to deliver scalability and availability beyond what is possible with monolithic, proprietary hardware.
Our customers need the flexibility to deploy in whatever environment is most advantageous, including costs, features, reliability, and their legal obligations. The bottom line is that flexibility wins. I’m excited to be at a company that embraces these challenges and provides options to our customers rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Roger: How key is the role of Big Data in developing your solutions?
Paul: Everyone’s definition of Big Data is different. Our founders started MongoDB – the name comes from “humongous” – because at a previous company they spent far too much time building out infrastructures to manage their data.
Recognizing early on that the mass amounts of volume of data being generated would become some of technology’s greatest pain points, they built a database that would eliminate the traditional friction points inherent in 30-year-old databases that weren’t designed for the challenges posed by modern application development.
In short, they built a database that would eliminate massive overhead, making it easy for users to deliver value to the world – simple to operate, fast development, open source, leveraging cloud architecture, and scaling to any size.
The result, five years later, is the fifth most popular database in the world, having quickly moved past other systems that have been on the market for decades. There is clearly something revolutionary about MongoDB, and it has a lot to do with the challenges Big Data poses in modern application development.