Build Better Mobile Apps -- Running MongoDB Realm and Google Cloud

Dana Groce
February 2, 2021 | Updated: September 9, 2024
#partners#technology

>> Announcement: Some features mentioned below will be deprecated on Sep. 30, 2025. Learn more.

We’re partnering with Google Cloud to offer MongoDB Realm as part of the MongoDB Cloud stack with Google Cloud to service users globally whether you’re building a new mobile app or modernizing an existing one.

Realm’s integrated application development services make it easy for developers to build industry leading apps on mobile devices and the web. With MongoDB Atlas running as a service with Google Cloud, it’s easy to connect your mobile database to Google services.

Customers choose Google Cloud to:

  • avoid vendor lock-in by running multi-cloud and hybrid cloud deployments
  • take advantage of Google Cloud’s machine learning and advanced analytics abilities
  • stay secure with the same protections Google Cloud itself uses to guard their data, applications, and infrastructure.

Why MongoDB Realm for Mobile?

Realm comes with 3 key features:

  1. Cross-platform mobile database
  2. Cross-platform mobile sync solution
  3. Time-saving application development services

Mobile Database

Realm’s mobile database is an open source, developer-friendly alternative to CoreData and SQLite. With Realm’s open source database, mobile developers can build offline-first apps in a fraction of the time. Supported languages include Swift, C#, Xamarin, JavaScript, Java, ReactNative, Kotlin, and Objective-C.

Realm’s Database was built with a flexible, object-oriented data model, so it’s simple to learn and mirrors the way developers already code. Because it was built for mobile, applications built on Realm are reliable, highly performant, and work across platforms.

Sync Solution

Realm Sync is an out-of-the-box synchronization service that keeps data up-to-date between devices, end users, and your backend systems, all in real-time.

It eliminates the need to work with REST, simplifying your offline-first app architecture. Use Sync to backup user data, build collaborative features, and keep data up to date whenever devices are online - without worrying about conflict resolution or networking code.

Powered by the Realm Mobile Database on the client-side and MongoDB Atlas on the backend, Realm is optimized for offline use and scales with you. Building a first-rate app has never been easier.

Application Development Services

With Realm app development services, your team can spend less time integrating backend data for your web apps, and more time building the innovative features that push your business initiatives forward. Services include:

  • GraphQL
  • Functions
  • Triggers
  • Data access controls
  • User authentication

Use these products from Google to accelerate the development and deployment of backend services:

  • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
  • Google Cloud Functions (FaaS)
  • Google App Engine (PaaS)

Realm and MongoDB Atlas with Google Cloud and Android

As Realm is a MongoDB product offered through Atlas, and Atlas is used by Realm to sync data between the database and clients, Google Cloud and Atlas abilities are key to the Realm user experience.

Figure 1: Screenshot of Realm offered through MongoDB Cloud UI

MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud

MongoDB Atlas delivers a fully managed service on Google Cloud’s globally scalable and reliable infrastructure. Atlas allows users to manage their MongoDB databases easily through the UI or an API call. It’s simple to migrate to, and offers sophisticated features such as Global Clusters that offer low-latency read and write access anywhere across the globe.

3 Key Abilities with MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud

Geographic Presence

  • All Google Cloud regions have at least 3 availability zones, providing higher availability, resiliency and geographic availability. Other public clouds do not have the same reliability guarantees.

Network Offering — Cost and Customer Benefits

  • Global VPC - global resources that reduce complexity in networking implementation
  • Performance - premium tier leverages performance of the Google Cloud network improving application performance and latency across tiers
  • Price - better pricing ratio for network egress costs

Native Integrations

  • Security -- Atlas offers native integrations to Google Auth through Realm, support for Google Cloud KMS for additional encryption at rest or MongoDB Client-Side Field Level Encryption, and OAuth flow based console integration
  • Billing -- pay as you go billing on Google Cloud Marketplace (Realm is purchased through Atlas credits similarly on Marketplace)

Realm and Android

With Realm, you can create mobile applications for Android devices. Realm supports all versions of the Android API after level 9 (Android 2.3 Gingerbread). Below is a sample reference architecture which shows how to leverage MongoDB Atlas with Google Cloud as an Operational Data Layer (ODL) / Operational Data Store (ODS) and build mobile applications using MongoDB Mobile and Realm Sync.

Figure 2: Reference Architecture for ODL on MongoDB Atlas and Realm with Google Cloud

Realm Customer Story — A Leading New York Healthcare Payer

MongoDB has partnered with Exafluence to deliver a COVID employee self-assessment health checker app for a leading healthcare payer in New York since the onset of the pandemic, they’ve needed to quickly adapt to new operational standards, as the situation with COVID evolves. MongoDB Atlas, Realm, Google Cloud, and Exafluence have all been a key part of allowing their onsite operations to continue.

The CDC and New York State require organizations to keep track of which of their employees reporting to a physical office for work. As a result, the organization must monitor their New York based employees who still come onsite in order to support their members. They needed an app that would capture their employees’ health, and ask a series of questions to determine if the associate was able to enter the facility.

Exafluence -- a MongoDB Global Strategic Partner working with the healthcare payer’s HR team and business team -- was able to deliver a complete solution in only three weeks from start to go-live. This rapid deployment was made possible using MongoDB Atlas, Realm, and Google Cloud. The completed app includes:

  • support for mobile devices
  • a web Portal to aggregate information
  • use of QR Scans to confirm access on iPads deployed in facility entrances
  • integration with Active Directory and alerts to the funds email system

This rapid deployment was made possible using MongoDB Atlas and Realm. The organization and Exafluence chose Realm because it’s application development services make it easy to work with data across both web and mobile applications. Realm works with React js, provides offline sync and is Atlas cloud ready.

MongoDB Atlas and Realm also make it easy to rapidly develop new features when the next stage of the pandemic changes app requirements. Exafluence will be able to quickly add app features tied to vaccination, like the ability for employees to disclose and share immunization certification via MongoDB’s FHIR API.

Prior to the Covid App, this healthcare payer chose to use Atlas on Google Cloud because the fully managed, global DBaaS accelerates development and allows them to manage both structured and unstructured data. They also needed a solution for analytics involving geocoding, machine learning, and dashboarding. With Atlas and Google Cloud, their teams get agility while with elastic scaling and provision on-demand resources.

Additional differentiators that drove the organization to select Google Cloud include:

  • Maps API
  • Air flow for scheduling
  • Cloud identity
  • Kubernetes deployment and seamless integration with MongoDB and Realm for mobile development
  • Scalable VM environments
  • Meeting CISO requirements

They were able to automate and offload operational tasks while taking advantage of built-in security best practices, and this in turn reduced regulatory risk. With Atlas and Google Cloud, their teams can also elastically scale and provision on-demand resources to build more microservices, in-line with their agile development requirements.

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MongoDB Rated an “Overall Leader” by Technology Analysts KuppingerCole

KuppingerCole, one of Europe’s leading technology analyst firms, has recognized MongoDB as an “overall leader” in a new report focused on enterprise databases in the cloud. In the report, KuppingerCole acknowledged MongoDB’s unique position as a database platform designed for the cloud age and well-suited to the applications that drive disruption, innovation, and competitive advantage. “Designed from scratch as a general-purpose database platform for the cloud age, MongoDB has grown into the world’s fastest-growing NoSQL ecosystem and one of the preferred engines for modern cloud-native applications,” wrote Alexei Balaganski, lead analyst for KuppingerCole. The report noted that, as the only overall leader in cloud databases that is not also a cloud services provider, MongoDB is uniquely committed to making sure data can move easily between multiple cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud). In addition to the overall leadership accolade, KuppingerCole gave MongoDB its “Strong positive” designation – the highest possible rating – in seven important areas: security, functionality, interoperability, usability, deployment, innovativeness, and market position. Excellence in Product, Innovation, and Market Position MongoDB was one of only four database services to achieve a leadership designation in each of the three areas key to the final categorization as an overall leader: product leadership, innovation leadership, and market leadership. Product Leadership. Here, KuppingerCole singled out MongoDB Atlas as the core of MongoDB’s cloud-agnostic database product, offered as a managed cloud service across the three major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP). Balaganski also refers to MongoDB's popularity among developers, who have rated it the “Most Wanted” database four years running in StackOverflow’s annual survey . “MongoDB offers maximum deployment flexibility and an interface for developers so familiar that other vendors chose to implement the MongoDB protocol for their own databases,” writes Balaganski. Innovation Leadership. KuppingerCole defines leadership in innovation not so much as a constant flow of new features, but as a customer-oriented upgrade approach. The analyst firm wants to see backward compatibility, especially at the API level, and it wants to see new features that meet emerging customer requirements. Clearly, MongoDB delivers. KuppingerCole lauded MongoDB's history of listening to its customers and delivering new and relevant features. The result, the analyst firm said, is that MongoDB has been, “One of the most popular NoSQL databases for years.” KuppingerCole specifically pointed out Atlas Search, Atlas Data Lake, and mobile support. Market leadership. MongoDB was rated a leader in this category as well. While Oracle has, “Arguably the largest number of on-prem database customers,” it was far from assured that all of them would migrate to Oracle Cloud. KuppingerCole said MongoDB, “Dominates the NoSQL database market across all major cloud platforms.” MongoDB Atlas' Unique Advantages In its analysis of the “overall leader” cohort, KuppingerCole showed why it could confidently claim that MongoDB and the MongoDB Atlas cloud platform, “Provide a simple, universal alternative for developers that do not want to replicate the complexity of their legacy on-prem infrastructures in the cloud and would rather avoid a plethora of specialized database engines, opting instead for a single interface to manage, query, and analyze all of their data.” Two other prominent vendors, said KuppingerCole, focus on a database portfolio strategy, offering a purpose-built database for every conceivable need. But KuppingerCole said that approach runs the risk of locking data in silos, and complicates analytics across silos. The analyst firm said that management capabilities can vary between different database engines. It also noted that another leading vendor’s database engine was not well-suited to highly distributed modern application architectures. MongoDB addresses those challenges. Among its strengths, KuppingerCole noted that MongoDB provides a single platform for transactional, search, and analytics workloads. It also mentioned MongoDB’s multi-cloud availability in AWS, GCP, and Azure; its advanced security features, such as client-side field-level encryption; and comprehensive developer support with drivers, tools, and additional services. That makes it, as Balaganski writes, “A one-stop platform for developing modern highly scalable, and distributed cloud-native applications.” And, of course, an overall leader.

January 29, 2021
Next →

Hanabi Technologies Uses MongoDB to Power AI Assistant, Hana

For all the hype surrounding generative AI, cynics tend to view the few real-world implementations as little more than “fancy chatbots.” But for Abhinav Aggarwal, CEO of Hanabi Technologies, the idea of a generative AI-powered bot that is more than just an assistant was intriguing. “I’d been using ChatGPT since it launched,” said Aggarwal. “That got me thinking: How could we make a chatbot that was like a team member?” And with that concept, Hana was born. The problem with bots “Most generative AI chatbots do not act like people; they wait for a command and give a response,” said Aggarwal. “We wanted to create a human-like chatbot that would proactively help people based on what they wanted—automating reminders, for example, or fetching time zones from your calendar to correctly schedule meetings.” Hanabi’s flagship product, Hana, is an AI assistant designed to enhance team collaboration within Google Chat, working in concert with Google Workspace and its suite of products. “Our target customers are smaller companies of between 10 and 50 people. At this size you’re not going to build your own agent from scratch,” he said. Hana integrates with Google APIs to deliver a human-like assistant that chimes in with helpful interventions, such as automatically setting reminders and making sure meetings are booked in the right time zone for each participant. “Hana is designed to bring AI to smaller companies and help them collaborate in a space where they are already working—Google Workspace,” Aggarwal explained. The MongoDB Atlas solution For Hana to act like a member of the team, Hanabi needed to process massive amounts of data to support advanced features like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for better information retrieval across Google Docs and many other sources. And with a rapidly growing user base of over 600 organizations and 17,000+ installs, Hanabi also required a secure, scalable, and high-performing data storage solution. MongoDB Atlas provided a flexible document model, built-in vector database, and scalable cloud-based infrastructure, freeing Hanabi engineers to build new features for Hana rather than focusing on rote tasks like data extract, transform, and load processes or manual scaling and provisioning. Now, MongoDB Atlas handles a variety of responsibilities: Scalability and security: MongoDB Atlas’s auto-scaling and automatic backup features have enabled Hanabi to seamlessly grow its user base without the need for manual database management. RAG: MongoDB Atlas plays a critical role in Hana’s RAG functionality. The platform enables Hanabi to split Google Docs into small sections, create embeddings, and store these sections in Atlas’s vector database. Development Processes: According to Aggarwal, MongoDB’s flexibility in managing changing schemas has been essential to the company’s fast-paced development cycle. Data Visualization: Using MongoDB Atlas Charts has enabled Hanabi to create comprehensive dashboards for real-time data visualization. This has helped the team track usage, set reminders, and optimize performance without needing to build a manual dashboard. Impact and results With MongoDB Atlas, Hanabi can successfully scale Hana to meet the demands of its rapidly expanding user base. The integration is also enabling Hana to offer powerful features like automatic interactions with customers, advanced information retrieval from Google Docs, and manually added memory snippets, making it an essential tool for teams around the world. Next steps Hanabi plans to continue integrating more tools into Hana while expanding its reach to personal Gmail users. The company is also rolling out a new automatic-interaction feature, further enhancing Hana’s ability to proactively assist users without direct commands. MongoDB Atlas remains a key component of Hanabi’s stack, alongside Google Kubernetes Engine, NestJS, and LangChain, enabling Hanabi to focus on innovating to improve the customer experience. Tech Stack MongoDB Atlas Google Kubernetes Engine NestJS LangChain Are you building AI apps? Join the MongoDB AI Innovators Program today! Successful participants gain access to free MongoDB Atlas credits, technical enablement, and invaluable connections within the broader AI ecosystem. If your company is interested in being featured, we’d love to hear from you. Connect with us at ai_adopters@mongodb.com.

November 21, 2024