MongoDB Employees Share Their Coming Out Stories: (Inter)national Coming Out Day 2022

MongoDB
October 11, 2022
#Diversity & Inclusion #Culture

National Coming Out Day is celebrated annually on October 11th and is widely recognized in the United States and parts of Europe. MongoDB proudly supports and embraces the LGBTQIA+ community across the globe, so we’ve reimagined this celebration as (Inter)national Coming Out Day, and this year is our third official celebration.

In our yearly tradition of honoring (Inter)national Coming Out Day, we ask our employees who are members of the LGBTQIA+ community to share their coming out experiences and perspectives.

Visibility is education. In bringing queer voices to the forefront, we are able to shine light on so many different persepctives, hopefully creating space for others to come out and live authentically. It’s only with continued storytelling, varied representation, and open conversations that we can try to invoke real change.
Cara Silverman (she/her)
Manager, EA, Product & Engineering | ERG Global Lead, NYC, USA

Hear from our own MongoDBers, who share their coming out journey and experience:

The full video, The Coming Out Journey, is available on our YouTube channel.

Twenty-four MongoDBers from the LGBTQIA+ community and allies participated in this video. With the behind-the-scenes teams included, we saw involvement across just about every team and department in the company. This project has been a true embodiment of our core values, including Embrace the Power of Differences, as allies and LGBTQIA+ folks came together to share their insights and support to create an inclusive space—not just internally, but globally and externally.

A great example of our Build Together value is showcased in this video, as our ally community came forward to show their support:

The full video, MongoDB Allies, is available on our YouTube channel.

(Inter)national Coming Out Day is an important day in the LBGTQIA+ community. Our own MongoDBers express what it means to them personally:

I didn't even know my identity was a thing. When I first came out, I thought I was a lesbian. And it was only through education efforts of being exposed to all the full spectrum of the rainbow, if you will, that I discovered later in life that there's a more personal term that describes me.
Angie Byron (she/they)
Lead, Community Programs, Vancouver, Canada

Coming Out Day means a lot because the entire one-year journey of coming out has been a great transformation in itself, to me—physically, mentally, emotionally—in all possible ways.
Aasawari Sahasrabuddhe (she/they)
Community Triage Engineer, Gurgaon, India

We still need Coming Out Day. We're not so far along, as a species, that we can say it doesn't matter because it still does. And so as long as it does matter, those of us who can share our story should. Representation does matter. This is not just a trite saying.
Tara Hernandez (she/her)
Vice President of R&D Productivity, California, USA

I went to a college in Texas where people weren't necessarily safely out. So it was always a big deal. And one of the very first things I did when I kind of took over that organization was start making a big deal about Coming Out Day. I think it's just so exciting to see it on a global scale, seeing how many cultures and how many countries have come along with us on this journey, and how many more people are able to live freely and as they are and without that fear.
Cris Newsome (she/they/y’all)
Software Engineer 2, Docs, Texas, USA

“Representation matters, and to hear these queer voices and to see these queer people, it's something as a child that I always looked for—to actually hear these positive queer stories from people, and it's actually a positive experience. It gives people hope, and hope can achieve a lot of things in the world.”
Seán Carroll (he/him)
Senior Marketing Operations Manager | ERG Regional Lead, Dublin, Ireland

It's critical that we are as visible as possible at all levels of the organization, different age groups, different regions that we come from. And the more visibility that we provide, the easier it will be for all of those around us and future generations to feel like they're able to come out.
Ryan Francis (he/him)
Vice President, WW Demand Generation & Field Marketing | Executive Sponsor of the Queer Collective, San Francisco, USA

International coming out day means a lot to me. As a member of the gay community, it's a significant milestone in my life and I think in the life of all LGBTQIA+ people as they come out.
Justin LaBreck (he/him)
Services Delivery Enablement Engineer | Global ERG Lead, San Diego, USA

Coming Out Day to me is a celebration of our community. It's also a way to support those that haven't made that journey yet, that haven't come out, that there's a community here waiting for you. We're here for you and we're here to support you.
Cian Walsh (he/him)
Senior Recruiter & Diversity Program Manager | ERG Regional Lead, Dublin, Ireland

The fact that we need a coming out day as opposed to just people being able to be their authentic selves everyday means that we are still not in that future that maybe 25, 30 years ago whenever I first came out, I probably was wishful thinking that someday this won't be a thing. People will just talk about their significant others and spouses, and other people will not necessarily assume what the gender of such person is, or if they assume and they're wrong, they're like, oh cool. You're gay or bi or queer or whatever.
Asya Kamsky (she/her)
Principal Engineer, NYC, USA

I think some of the best relationships that I've had, or the best teams I have been in, have been teams where we all know each other very personally and we all know each other's stories and that has created a huge sense of harmony. And if you could bottle that and sell it I think there would be so few problems in the world.
Shane O’Brien (he/him)
Sr. Manager, Employee Experience | ERG Regional Lead, Dublin, Ireland

What I see International Coming Out Day as is really an opportunity to kind of reframe the experience of coming out. So taking what is a historically difficult process and really using it as an opportunity to kind of build visibility for just the overall LGBTQ community and how we can make a difference in the world.
Jeff Wilfong (he/him)
Enterprise Account Executive NYC, USA

International coming out day, what that means to me is celebrating who you are as a person. So no matter where you're from, no matter what your role is personally and professionally, it's just being completely comfortable in your own skin and celebrating who you are.
Alex Bissell (he/him)
Strategic Customer Success Manager, NYC, USA

If you're looking for more content just like this, then check out our 2021 and 2020 blog posts.

ERG Global Lead Cara Silverman, who led this project, would like to thank MongoDB’s Production, Marketing, and Employer Brand teams who worked together to create our first-ever global Coming Out Day written and video content featuring the coming out stories of our MongoDBers. The goal of this expanded project was to reach even more people and increase visibility through representation.

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MongoDB and Google Partnership Gains Momentum

In April 2022 MongoDB launched a pay-as-you-go Atlas service on Google Cloud Marketplace. As we said at the time, this offering provides developers with a simplified subscription experience and gives enterprises more freedom in how they run MongoDB on Google Cloud. Since that launch, we've had many hundreds of customers sign up from a wide range of industries including Retail, Automotive, Education, Media & Entertainment, Healthcare, and more. But that's not all that happened in the past six months. Developers clearly love to build data-rich applications with MongoDB Atlas, and just as clearly they love to bring that data to life through Google Cloud's data services like Google BigQuery, Vertex AI, and more. To indulge that developer affection for MongoDB + Google Cloud, the two companies have been busy integrating our managed services to help customers make data smarter, more intuitive, and easier to use—wherever developers choose. Making data smart Modern applications must be able to automate the process of capturing and processing the data within an application. Combining real-time, operational, and embedded analytics enables a business to influence and automate decision-making for the app and provide real-time insights for the user. This year MongoDB and Google Cloud have combined to deliver best-in-class, application-level analytics. For example, in the weeks leading up to Google Cloud Next ’22, Google Cloud and MongoDB announced integration of Google BigQuery and MongoDB Atlas, among other Google data announcements . Many enterprises turn to BigQuery for its powerful, simple approach to data warehousing needs, but applying it to data in MongoDB wasn't always straightforward. To make moving and transforming data between Atlas and BigQuery easier, the MongoDB and Google teams worked together to build Dataflow templates that make it simple to package a Dataflow pipeline for deployment. The two companies also announced the integration of Atlas and BigQuery with Vertex AI to bring the power of Google's machine learning/AI expertise to MongoDB data. Developers can access a reference architecture and demo for retail and finance fraud detection scenarios. More integrations will roll out over the coming months. All of which is great for customers. For years customers like Universe, part of Live Nation, have used MongoDB with Google Cloud services such as Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery to build data pipelines and more. In early 2022, Forbes, a 100-year old leader in business journalism, turned to MongoDB and Google Cloud to deliver a recommendation engine for its journalists, which uses Google Cloud's machine learning services to make suggestions to appropriate contributors. These and other customers have discovered that MongoDB's data platform and Google's data services are truly better together. Making data intuitive All those data smarts don't amount to much if developers can't easily make use of them. Over the past six months, MongoDB and Google Cloud have further partnered to ensure a simple, intuitive developer experience. For example, we've made it incredibly easy to deploy a serverless, MEAN stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS, NodeJS) application with Google Cloud Run (you can read the how-to or watch a video tutorial). Similarly, we've also combined with Vercel to make it simple to build full-stack serverless apps. Serverless means you don't need to worry about any hassle associated with managing infrastructure, and Cloud Run means deployment is also a breeze. More collaboration like this will follow, all with the goal of reducing developer friction and making it easier to use stacks that combine Google and MongoDB products together. Additionally, we've made it straightforward for developers to extend their MongoDB applications with APIs using Google's Apigee, a platform for managing and securing their APIs. For example, developers increasingly turn to Apigee and MongoDB to help enterprises pull data from legacy systems without needing the cumbersome process of integrating legacy systems. Recently, the MongoDB connector has been released in pre-GA to help developers build their APIs with MongoDB even more quickly. Developers love these and other integrations. For example, Conrad, a leading European retailer, needed to find a way to build an online B2B marketplace for its own and third-party products. Conrad turned to Atlas and Google Cloud. Together, the companies partnered to help Conrad shift to a microservices-based architecture and delivered a simple, fast, and comprehensive data environment. In like manner, TIM, a global fixed, mobile, cloud, and data center service provider, has leaned on Atlas and Google Cloud to create a dynamic data infrastructure, which has led to a dramatic improvement in customer satisfaction scores. Making data omnipresent MongoDB has always put a premium on developer flexibility, which has not only meant unparalleled support for a wide variety of languages, frameworks, etc., but also flexibility in deployment, including multicloud. Google, for its part, has been a leader in multicloud with Anthos, a platform that enables enterprises to manage GKE clusters and workloads running on virtual machines across environments. It's a way for developers to build once and deploy anywhere, including at the edge, in the data center, or on another cloud, yet with a single cloud control plane. Very cool. Among other benefits, this is a great way for enterprises to meet regulatory and data sovereignty requirements. It is not, however, the only way enterprises can attain that benefit with MongoDB and Google Cloud. As recently announced, MongoDB and Google Cloud have collaborated to give European customers additional choice in where they can securely keep their data, by making MongoDB available on the T-Systems Sovereign Cloud powered by Google Cloud. Finally, MongoDB and Google Cloud have announced the availability of MongoDB Enterprise Advanced on Google Cloud Marketplace. As much as developers love cloud, sometimes they have the need to self-manage MongoDB. With this listing we together offer that freedom. Now is the time to give it a try MongoDB and Google keep giving developers increasingly rich ways to make use of data with operational, application-centered analytics and ML/AI, while also serving up a wide array of choices of where to run those applications. There are many reasons to run MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud, and one of the easiest is with our self-service, pay-as-you-go listing on Google Cloud Marketplace . Please give it a try and let us know what you think. Try our self-service, pay-as-you-go listing on Google Cloud Marketplace today.

October 11, 2022

Next →

MongoDB Database Observability: Integrating with Monitoring Tools

This post is the final in a three-part series on leveraging database observability. Welcome back to our series on Leveraging Database Observability! Our previous post showcased a real-world use case highlighting how MongoDB Atlas’s observability tools effectively tackle database performance challenges. Whether you’re a developer, DBA, or DevOps engineer, our mission is to empower you to harness the full potential of your data through our observability suite . Integrating Atlas metrics with your central enterprise observability tools can simplify your operations. By seamlessly working with popular observability tools, our approach helps teams streamline workflows and enhance visibility across systems. Integrating MongoDB Atlas with third-party monitoring tools MongoDB’s developer data platform combines all essential data services for building modern applications within a unified experience. Our purpose-built observability tools for Atlas environments offer automatic monitoring and optimization, guiding diagnostics tailored specifically for MongoDB. Additionally, we extend Atlas metrics into your existing enterprise observability stack, enabling seamless integration without replacing your current tools. This creates a consolidated, single-pane view that unifies Atlas telemetry with other tech and application metrics, ensuring comprehensive visibility into both database and full-stack performance. This integration empowers you to monitor, receive alerts, and make data-driven decisions within your existing workflows, driving greater efficiency. Below is a quick guide to modifying integration settings through the Atlas UI and the popular integrations we support: Navigate to the Project Integrations page in Atlas. Choose the organization and project you want to configure from the navigation bar. On the Project Integrations page, select the third-party services you’d like to integrate. Configure the chosen services with the required API keys and regions. Critical integrations for your observability platform With Atlas’s Datadog and Prometheus integrations, you can send critical MongoDB metrics to these platforms, empowering detailed, real-time monitoring. Through Datadog , you can track database operation counts, query efficiency, and resource usage, ideal for pinpointing bottlenecks and managing resources. Similarly, Prometheus enables you to monitor essential metrics like query times, connection rates, and memory usage, supporting flexible tracking of database health and performance. Both integrations facilitate proactive detection of issues, alert configuration for resource thresholds, and a cohesive view of Atlas data when visualized in Grafana. Atlas’s integration with PagerDuty streamlines incident management by sending metrics like performance alerts, billing anomalies, and security events directly to PagerDuty. This integration records incidents automatically, notifies teams upon alerts, and supports two-way syncing, ensuring resolved alerts in Atlas are reflected in PagerDuty. It enables efficient incident response and resource allocation to maintain system stability. With Atlas integrations for Microsoft Teams and Slack, you can route key metrics—such as query latency, disk usage, and throughput—to these channels for timely updates. Teams can use these insights for real-time performance monitoring, incident response, and collaboration. Notifications through these platforms ensure your team stays informed on database performance, storage health, and user activity changes as they occur. Use case: Centralized observability with MongoDB Atlas, Datadog, and Slack Let’s walk through a hypothetical scenario for ShopSmart, an e-commerce company that leverages MongoDB Atlas to manage its product catalog and customer data. As traffic surges, the DevOps team faces challenges in monitoring application performance and database health effectively. To tackle these challenges, the team leverages MongoDB Atlas’ integration with Datadog and Slack, creating a powerful observability ecosystem. Integrating MongoDB Atlas with Datadog: The team pushes key MongoDB Atlas metrics into Datadog, such as query performance, connection counts, and Atlas Vector Search metrics. With Datadog, they can visualize these metrics and correlate overall MongoDB performance with their other applications. Out-of-the-box monitors and dedicated dashboards allow the team to track metrics like throughput, average read/write latency, and current connections. This visibility helps pinpoint bottlenecks in real time, ensuring optimal database performance and improving overall application responsiveness. Setting up alerts in Datadog: The team configures alerts for critical metrics like high query latency and increased error rates. When thresholds are breached, Datadog instantly notifies the team. This proactive approach allows the team to address potential performance issues before they impact customers. Integrating Datadog with Slack: To ensure fast communication, alerts are sent directly to the dedicated Slack channel, “ShopSmart-Alerts.” This integration fosters seamless collaboration, enabling the team to discuss and resolve issues in real-time. With these integrations, ShopSmart’s engineering team can monitor performance quickly and address issues efficiently. The unified observability approach enhances operational efficiency, improves the customer experience, and supports ShopSmart’s competitive edge in the e-commerce industry. By leveraging MongoDB Atlas, Datadog, and Slack, the team ensures scalable performance and drives continuous innovation. Conclusion MongoDB Atlas empowers developers and organizations to achieve unparalleled observability and control over their database environments. By seamlessly integrating with central enterprise observability tools, Atlas enhances your ability to monitor performance metrics and ensures you can do so within your existing workflows. This means you can focus on building modern applications confidently, knowing you have the insights and alerts necessary to maintain optimal performance. Embrace the power of MongoDB Atlas and transform your approach to database management—because your applications can thrive when your data is observable. And that wraps up our Leveraging Database Observability series! We hope you learned something new and found value in these discussions. Sign up for MongoDB Atlas , our cloud database service, to see database observability in action. To dive deeper and expand your knowledge, check out this learning byte for more insights on the MongoDB observability suite and how it can enhance your database performance.

November 14, 2024