Learn about the nexus of MongoDB and microservices in 15 minutes

MongoDB has been downloaded more than 70 million times since it was first released in 2009, and it’s only getting more popular as microservices and cloud computing truly hit the mainstream. Yet many people still don’t fully understand when it makes sense to use a non-relational (or NoSQL) database such as MongoDB, or how the technology and the company behind it have evolved over the past decade.

In this episode of Cloud Native in 15 Minutes, MongoDB co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz explains when and why companies tend to use the technology, and why they especially love running it (and all databases) as a managed cloud service. He also discusses the importance of viewing developers as decision-makers and the reasons why the vast majority of MongoDB users don’t need to worry about its open-source licensing change that caused waves a while ago.

Here are a few quotes from the episode, where Horowitz goes into why developers matter, and how MongoDB fits into the world of microservices.

Developers choose databases

“Developers are typically the ones making database choices today. Even in big enterprises … the typical pattern we see is that a developer tries to bring it in or they use it for a small project, then it gets the official executive approval, and then it goes on a menu. And once it’s on a menu, it’s something developers can choose from. But at the end of the day, it’s still a developer making a choice on any given project what database they want to use.”

Switch databases out of necessity, not for fun

“There are a lot of places where the data model for an application just doesn’t fit into a relational data model, and then MongoDB is a no-brainer. There are cases where none of the relational databases scale to the kinds of volumes people need, and that’s a great use case for MongoDB. There are cases where certain features, like being able to put data spread around the world in a single cluster, are critical either for compliance reasons or for latency reasons.

“… It’s not really people who are saying, ‘Oh, I’ve got an Oracle database, let me just swap it out with Mongo just for fun.’ It’s a lot of work.”

MongoDB and microservices

“MongoDB tends to be used in a lot of microservices use cases because it fits very well into the paradigm of, ’… This service is going to use this kind of data model and it’s going to have a very tight mapping.’ It’s very easy to have lots of MongoDB instances that can scale with a service, and therefore it works well.

“A lot of companies take these big monolithic applications … and their way off of this monolithic environment is to peel off services one at a time, and as they do that they tend to often move them to MongoDB, as well. They take a hundred different applications using the same database, start pulling off services, and as they pull off a service they also move the data to MongoDB.”