Faster Migrations to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud with migVisor by EPAM

Paresh Saraf and Jeff Westenhaver
January 21, 2022 | Updated: October 21, 2022

As the needs of Google Cloud customers evolve and shift towards new user expectations, more and more customers are choosing MongoDB as an ideal alternative to legacy databases. Together, we’ve partnered with users looking to digitize and grow their businesses (such as Forbes), or meet increased demand due to COVID (such as our work with Boxed, the online grocer) by scaling up infrastructure and data processing within a condensed time frame. As a fully-managed service within the Google Cloud Marketplace, MongoDB Atlas enables our joint customers to quickly deploy applications on Google Cloud with a unified user experience and an integrated billing model. Migrations to managed cloud database services vary in complexity, but even under the most straightforward circumstances, careful evaluation and planning is required. Customer database environments often leverage database technologies from multiple vendors, across different versions, and can run into thousands of deployments. This makes manual assessment cumbersome and error prone.

This is where EPAM Systems, a provider with strategic specialization in database and application modernization solutions, comes in. EPAM’s database migration assessment tool, migVisor, is a first-of-its-kind cloud database migration assessment product that helps companies analyze database workloads, configuration, and structure to generate a visual cloud migration roadmap that identifies potential quick wins as well as challenge areas. migVisor identifies the best migration path for databases using sophisticated scoring logic to rank the complexity of migrating them to a cloud-centric technology stack.

Previously applicable only to migrations from RDBMS to cloud-based RDBMS, migVisor is now available for MongoDB to MongoDB Atlas migrations.

migVisor helps you:

Analyze migration decisions objectively by providing a secure assessment of source and target databases that’s independent of deployed environments
Accelerate time to migration by automating the discovery and assessment process, which reduces development cycles from a few weeks to a few days
Easily understand tech insights by providing a visual overview of your entire journey, enabling better planning and improving stakeholder visibility
Reduce database licensing costs by giving you intelligent insights on the target environment and recommended migration paths

Key features of migVisor for MongoDB

For several years, migVisor by EPAM has delivered automated assessments that have helped hundreds of customers migrate their relational databases to cloud-based or cloud-native databases. Now, migVisor adds support for the world’s leading modern data platform: MongoDB. As part of the initial release, migVisor will support self-managed MongoDB to MongoDB Atlas migration assessments. We plan to support TCO for MongoDB migrations, application modernization, migration assessment, and relational MongoDB migration assessments in future releases.

MongoDB is also a natural fit for Google Cloud’s Open Cloud strategy of providing customers a broad set of fully managed database services, as Google Cloud's own GM and VP of Engineering & Databases, Andi Gutmans, notes:

We are always looking for ways to simplify migrations for our customers. Now, with EPAM's database migration assessment tool, migVisor, supporting MongoDB Atlas, our customers can easily complete database assessments—including TCO analyses and migration complexity assessments, and generate comprehensive migration plans. A simplified migration experience combined with our joint Marketplace success enables customers to consolidate their data workloads into the cloud while making the development and procurement process simple—so users can focus more on innovation.

How the migVisor assessment works

migVisor analyzes source databases (on-prem or in any cloud environment) for migration assessment to a new target. The assessment includes the following steps:

The simple-to-use migVisor Metadata Collector (mMC) collects metadata from the source database, including: featureCompatibilityVersion value, journaling status for data bearing nodes, MongoDB storage size used, replica set configuration, and more.

*Figure 1: mMC GUI Edit Connection Screen*

On the migVisor Analysis Dashboard you can select the source/target pair (e.g., MongoDB to MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud).

In the migVisor console, you can then view the automated assessment output that was created from migVisor’s migration complexity scoring engine, including classification of the migration into high/medium/low complexity and identification of potential migration challenges and incompatibilities.

Finally, you can also export the assessment output in CSV format for further analysis in your preferred data analysis/reporting tool.

Conclusion

Together, Google Cloud and MongoDB have successfully worked with many organizations to streamline cloud migrations and modernize their legacy landscape. To build on the foundation of providing our customers with the best-in-class experience, we’ve closely worked with Google Cloud and EPAM Systems to integrate MongoDB Atlas with migVisor. Because of this, customers will now be able to better plan migrations, reduce risk and avoid missteps, identify quick wins for TCO reduction, review migration complexities, and appropriately plan migration phases for the best outcomes.

Learn more about how you can deploy, manage, and grow MongoDB on Google Cloud on our partner page.

If you’d like guidance and migration advice, please reach out to mdb-gcp-marketplace@mongodb.com to get in touch with the Google, MongoDB, and EPAM Sales teams.

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Starting a Career as a Solutions Architect in MongoDB’s Remote Presales Centre

MongoDB’s Remote Presales Centre is kickstarting presales careers and helping customers unlock the value of MongoDB technology. I spoke with Chris Dowling and Snehal Bhatia to learn more about the Remote Presales Centre Solutions Architect role, how they’re making an impact, and why this is an exciting opportunity for those interested in understanding the intersection of business and technology. Jackie Denner: Hi, Chris and Snehal. Thanks for sitting down with me today to discuss the Remote Presales Centre. What is MongoDB’s Remote Presales Centre team? Chris Dowling: The Remote Presales Centre Solutions Architect is an introductory Solutions Architect (SA) role. Our global team is spread across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, and we are actively growing. We currently have SAs in EMEA covering French, German, Italian, Spanish, and English speaking customers. By joining the team, you’ll essentially be in an “incubation” period to gain experience in a presales role and exposure to sales cycles. Snehal Bhatia: Yes, this Solutions Architect role is for people who are earlier in their career and might not necessarily come from a presales background. We’re not dedicated to particular customers or accounts, rather we cover a wider perspective to help a larger volume of customers across various regions and Sales teams. Not only do we gain valuable experience, but we’re able to add value to the sales cycle by way of customer education through enablement sessions and workshops, along with engaging with customers at an earlier stage to bring technical value from the get-go. We’re also brought in to help qualify opportunities during discovery meetings. Overall, the biggest gap we see is that customers often have a difficult time understanding MongoDB technology, so we’re there to provide clarity, answer questions, and showcase the value of MongoDB. JD: So, what is a typical week like in your Solutions Architect role? CD: I’ve had 15 customer contacts this week. If you’re looking at strictly one-on-one sessions, the maximum number of customers someone on our team would handle per week is around 20. If you take into account some of the wider marketing events we help run as well, it could be as many as 100 customers, it really depends on the day. We don’t just do account-based activities, we also run wider campaigns like workshops and webinars. Snehal and I also had the opportunity to speak at MongoDB.local London in November 2021 on the topics of read and write concerns and how to set up your database for the tradeoffs you need and how ethical concerns need to be factored into technology and IoT design. We also get the chance to do things outside of core responsibilities and are able to work on side projects if we’d like. For example, I really enjoy management and education so I do a lot with sales reps to help them understand MongoDB technology. We really do a mixture of things. In a typical week, we’ll have one or two webinars, a few security questionnaires which is part of the end of a deal cycle and includes some technical questions that we need to respond to, then we have discovery meetings and prep calls with different reps, and we also have a day dedicated to enablement. SB: Yes, we have all of these customer engagements but the core of it is the prep that comes beforehand. We end up working with Marketing, Sales, Sales Managers, Product Owners, Professional Services - we work with a lot of different teams to get their insight so that we’re able to provide a complete view or solution to the customer. The internal prep meetings are a big part of that execution. JD: Why would someone move from an implementation role into a Remote Presales Centre role? CD: Snehal and I both come from an implementation background. I think you should join the Remote Presales Centre team if you’re interested in the architecture of how businesses are running their systems and want to see how the sales process works. In this role, we’re uncovering the answers to “What is motivating the customer to do this? Why would they buy MongoDB? Does MongoDB work for them?” Every day is different for us. In an implementation role, you end up working on the same system and use cases day in and day out, whereas in our role we get to see everything under the sun of what customers might want to do and get to go in and explore a new piece of technology. It’s exciting to see the newest things in tech. SB: In my previous implementation role the goal was to become an expert on just one of the products, which didn’t really help with broadening my skillset. When I came here, I had the opportunity to work with customers from financial services, telecom, banking, IoT, startups, big enterprises, you name an industry or company size and we’ve done something for them, or you name a technology and we’ve likely worked with it. That variety is not something you’d get in an implementation role. Not to mention, in implementation roles you’re often told what to do. The requirements are already made up and you just have to meet them. In our roles as SAs, we’re really influencing the direction of things and understanding the bigger picture and business implications of utilizing the technology. We have the ability to influence customers in a positive way and provide value. JD: Can you describe the learning curve for someone moving into the Remote Presales Centre from a more delivery-focused role? SB: I would say that the biggest mindset shift is instead of immediately answering questions, you need to stop and ask why. If someone says “We want to do this” your first instinct may be to respond and say “Yes we have the capabilities to meet that”, but really you should stop and ask “Why do you want to do this? What value is it going to bring for you? How is this going to influence your business direction?” You need curiosity to understand what the customer is trying to achieve instead of focusing on solving specific issues and pain points, which is very much the focus in an implementation role. CD: It’s also learning the sales cycle and how sales operates, along with figuring out what drives reps and what they want out of the Remote Presales Centre. Sometimes reps need us to explain the technology and sometimes we’re just there for credibility. It’s getting in the mindset of partnering with sales not working for sales. There is obviously a technology learning curve as well since MongoDB products are vast and often complex. SB: I think that extends to the customers we work with as well. Every call you go into you’ll be meeting with a different “customer persona”. Sometimes you’re talking to very technical people like developers and DBAs, so you need to be able to tailor the conversation as per their priorities. But, if you’re meeting with the CTO, you need to contextualize it in business terms to relay what the business needs. It’s all about understanding your audience and tailoring the conversation. JD: Aside from databases, what other technologies do you need to be familiar with or are you exposed to? SB: Everything! When you think of a database, you will never use a database by itself, you have to build an application on top of it. A lot of our role is understanding how the database is contributing to the whole software development lifecycle and overall project. At the end of the day, it’s a part of the tech stack, so you have to understand the whole tech stack, the underlying infrastructure, and the application that’s built on top of the database. It’s not just MongoDB that we talk or learn about, but it’s every other database in the market and every technology that the customer is working with. Every customer we talk to is working with a different tool, programming language, or software development methodology, and you need to be able to communicate with them. JD: How do you stay connected with your colleagues when you are all working remote? CD: If we’re running a workshop it’s a team event, so we end up working closely for that. We also have weekly syncs where we talk about what we’re working on and talk through challenges, and we have things like enablement sessions and coffee chats. SB: These sessions are also on a global level so we have the opportunity to work with the team in the Americas. Since we operate on a volume basis, we’ll discuss workload distribution and try to prioritize tasks based on people’s interests. CD: Yes, for example, I really like time series and search, so I’ll handle a lot of time series and search requests. There’s someone else on the team who loves Realm, our mobile database, so we give him all the Realm requests. JD: Often people are reluctant to move into presales as they don’t consider themselves sales-oriented. How would you respond to that? CD: Stop thinking of it as sales! Think of it as you get to talk to tons of customers about what they think the best technological solution is, and then you can provide insight into MongoDB and how our technology can improve what they’re trying to do. It’s a really technical job in the sense that you’re looking at organizations’ architectures and you’re figuring out why customers are doing what they do. You get to ask a lot of questions and see a lot of new technology. You could end up building proof of values out of that which means you then get to play around with this new technology. SB: I think presales is the best of both worlds. You get to interact with a lot of people in various scenarios, but you are the trusted advisor for the customer. You’re there to help them and are on their side, which means customers trust and confide in you. JD: What learning and growth opportunities are there for someone on the Remote Presales Centre team? CD: You start off doing simple things like learning about MongoDB products, getting ground knowledge, learning customer stories, and understanding why customers use MongoDB. Then you move on to discovery calls with customers and learning how to scope things out for yourself. From there, as you spend more time in the Service Centre, you slowly get further and further through the deal cycle. For example, a few months ago I was in a workshop to determine the technical feasibility of MongoDB’s solution after we had already worked with the customer to determine business objectives and requirements. You eventually go through the whole sales cycle with the goal being that you can execute the whole sales cycle by the time you leave to go into the field. SB: Since the Service Centre is a somewhat new team for MongoDB, you’re also part of discussing processes and helping determine what makes the team most efficient. You get to contribute to building a whole new team and company right now, which is not something you would get in a mature team with defined processes. CD: As the team grows there are a lot of mentorship opportunities as well. MongoDB is growing so quickly that new sales reps come in and are great at selling, but they don’t always have a technical background or understand MongoDB’s value proposition. We are that technical backup for them, and this allows the field SAs more time to do the really deep technical things that we’ll eventually get to do once we move into a more senior position. JD: Why should someone join your team? CD: You have the opportunity to learn so much about MongoDB’s technology and sales cycle, and you get to meet anyone and everyone. I could be talking to a Product Manager in the morning about the newest release and a Customer Success Manager in the afternoon. You really get to meet the whole organization. You’ll have a lot of internal visibility which is great because it also provides pathways to transfer internally if you want to. SB: You don’t get this visibility in most other roles because you’re usually aligned to a region or team. Here, we get to meet everyone in Europe. Chris and I put together a spreadsheet of all of the sales reps in Europe and there’s only 12 we haven’t had the chance to work with yet. Not only do we get to work with all the reps, but we also work with Product Managers, Customer Success, Marketing, Information Security, plus all of their managers. It’s a great way to get introduced to the company. Interested in a Presales career at MongoDB? We have several open roles on our teams across the globe and would love for you to transform your career with us!

January 20, 2022

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MongoDB: Powering Digital Natives

Today's rapidly evolving digital landscape is dominated by digital native companies, driving innovation . These are companies born in the digital age and who operate through digital channels with a business model enabled by technology and data. They are not only adept at using technology but are also reshaping the way software is developed and deployed. This article delves into the challenges and opportunities facing digital natives in modern application development, with a particular focus on the complexities of managing data. We’ll explore how the right data platform can empower your digital native organization to build high-quality software faster, adapt to changing market demands, and unlock the full potential of your business. Strong foundations: The four pillars of tech-fueled growth for digital natives Achieving explosive growth requires a strong foundation built on specific principles, which empower rapid scaling and success. Here, we explore the four key pillars that fuel tech-driven growth for digital natives: Product-market fit, fast: As a digital native, you must continuously ship and iterate products to achieve a quick product-market fit. This builds customer trust and captures opportunities before competitors can in an evolving market. Data and AI-driven decisions: You must leverage data to personalize experiences, automate processes, and guide product decisions. A robust data architecture feeds real-time data into AI models, enabling data-driven decisions organization-wide. Balance of freedom and control: Your developers must have the freedom to choose technologies, even as your organization maintains control over the infrastructure to manage risks and costs at scale. Selected technologies must integrate within your overall technology estate. Extensible and open technologies: You must explore disruptive technologies while maintaining existing systems. Freedom from platform and vendor lock-in enables quick adoption of innovations, from current generative AI capabilities to future technological advances. Data: The unsolved challenge in modern application development From cloud platforms and managed services to gen AI code assistants, advancements have transformed how engineering teams build, ship, and run applications: Agile methods and programmatic APIs streamline development, while CI/CD and infrastructure as code automate processes. Containerization, microservices, and serverless architectures enable modularity, while new languages and frameworks boost capabilities. Enhanced logging and monitoring tools provide deep application health insights. Figure 1: Tools and processes to maximize velocity. But none of these advancements address where developers spend most of their time— data . In fact, 73% of developers share time and again that working with data is the hardest part of building an application or feature. So why is data the problem? Traditionally, selecting a database, often an open-source relational one, is the first step in development. However, these databases can struggle with the characteristics of modern data: it’s high volume, unstructured, and constantly evolving. As applications mature and their data demands grow, development teams may encounter challenges with achieving scalability and maintaining service resilience. Some teams turn to NoSQL databases, but even then they find there are limited capabilities, pushing them back to relational databases. As the application gains traction, the business’s appetite for innovation grows, compelling development teams to incorporate an expanding array of database technologies. This results in an architectural sprawl, imposing on teams the challenges of mastering, sustaining, and harmonizing new technologies. Concurrently, the dynamic technology landscape undergoes constant evolution, demanding teams to swiftly adjust. As a result, self-contained, autonomous teams encounter these hurdles recurrently, highlighting the pressing need for streamlined solutions to mitigate complexity and enhance agility. Figure 2: The evolving tech landscape. Data sprawl: A major threat to developer productivity and business agility Data sprawl is slowing everyone down. The more systems we add, the harder it is for developers to keep up. Each new database brings its own unique language, format, and way of working. This creates a huge headache for managing everything—from buying new systems to making sure they all work together securely. It’s a constant battle to keep data accessible, consistent, and backed up across all these different platforms. Figure 3: Teams building on separate stacks leads to data sprawl and manageability issues across the organization It compromises every single one of the four outcomes your technology foundation should be providing, yielding the opposite results: Missed opportunities, lost customers: Fragmented development experiences consume time as engineers struggle with multiple technologies, frameworks, and extract, transform, and load mechanisms for duplicating data between systems. This slows down releases, degrades digital product quality, and impedes engineers from achieving product-market fit and effective competition. Flying blind: With your operational data siloed across multiple systems, you lack the data foundations necessary to use live data in shaping customer experiences or reacting to market changes. This is because you are unable to feed reliable, consistent, real-time data into your AI models to take action within the flow of the application or to provide the business with up-to-the-second visibility into operations. High attrition, high costs: Complex data architecture impacts development team culture, leading to siloed knowledge, inefficient collaboration, and decreased developer satisfaction. This complexity also consumes substantial resources in maintaining existing systems by diverting resources from new projects that are vital for business competition in new markets. Disruption from new technologies: Dependence on any one cloud provider can stifle innovation for development teams by restricting access to the latest technologies. Developers are confined to the tools and services offered by a single provider, hindering their ability to explore and integrate new, potentially more efficient, or advanced technologies. Speed: A unified developer experience for building high-quality software faster In today’s digital world, speed is king. Your customers expect seamless experiences, but clunky applications leave them frustrated. But traditional databases can be a bottleneck, struggling to keep pace with your ever-evolving data and slowing down development. The future of data is here, and it’s flexible: a data platform built for digital natives . It leverages a flexible document model, letting you store and work with your data exactly how you need it. This eliminates rigid structures and complex migrations, freeing your developers to focus on what matters—building amazing applications faster. Flexible document data models empower developers to handle today’s rapidly evolving application data ( 80%+ unstructured) that relational databases struggle with. MongoDB documents are richly typed, boosting developer productivity by eliminating the need for lengthy schema migrations when implementing new features. Developers get to use their preferred tools and languages. Through its drivers and integrations, MongoDB supports all of the most popular programming languages, frameworks, integrated development environments, and AI-code assistance tools. MongoDB scales! It starts small and scales globally. Built for elasticity and horizontal scaling, it handles massive workloads without app changes. Figure 4: A unified developer experience, integrating all necessary data services for building sophisticated modern applications Introducing MongoDB Atlas : a fully-managed cloud database built for the modern developer. It enables the integration of real-time data from devices with AI capabilities (through vector embeddings and large language models ) to personalize user experiences. Stream processing empowers constant data analysis, while in-app analytics provides real-time insights without needing separate data warehouses, all while automatically managing data movement and storage for cost-effectiveness. MongoDB Atlas simplifies database management with the following: Easy deployment via UI, API, CLI, Kubernetes, and infrastructure as code tools. Automated operations for cost-effective performance and real-time monitoring. MongoDB Atlas customer success stories: Development with speed, scale, and efficiency Delivery Hero Delivery Hero, a global leader in online food delivery, leverages MongoDB Atlas to power its rapid service. Founded in 2011, Delivery Hero now serves millions of customers in over 70 countries through brands like PedidosYa, foodpanda, and Glovo. Having replaced its legacy SQL database, Delivery Hero optimized operations and bolstered performance by using MongoDB Atlas. By leveraging MongoDB Atlas Search, Delivery Hero revolutionized its search functionality, ensuring a seamless user experience for its extensive customer base through simplified indexing and real-time data accuracy. MongoDB’s scalability has empowered Delivery Hero to manage over 100 million products in its catalog without encountering latency issues, enabling the company to expand its services while maintaining peak performance. This agility, coupled with MongoDB’s cost-effectiveness, has enabled Delivery Hero to swiftly adapt to evolving customer demands, solidifying its position in the fiercely competitive delivery market. MongoDB Atlas Search was a game changer. We ran a proof of concept and discovered how easy it is to use. We can index in one click, and because it’s a feature of MongoDB, we know data is always up-to-date and accurate. Andrii Hrachov, Principal Software Engineer, Delivery Hero Read the full customer story to learn more. Coinbase Coinbase, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange boasting 245,000 ecosystem partners and managing assets worth $273 billion , trusts MongoDB to handle its extensive data workload. As the company grew, MongoDB scaled seamlessly to accommodate the increased demand. To further improve performance in the fast-paced crypto world, Coinbase partnered with MongoDB to develop a system that significantly accelerated data transfer to reporting tools, reducing processing time from days to a mere 5-6 hours. This near real-time data access enables Coinbase to rapidly analyze trends and make informed decisions, maintaining a competitive edge in the ever-evolving crypto landscape. Watch Coinbase's full session at MongoDB.local Austin, 2024 to learn more. MongoDB: Your flexible platform for digital growth With MongoDB, you can freely explore, experiment, develop, and deploy according to your digital-native business needs. If you would like to learn more about how MongoDB can empower your digital-native business to conquer market trends, visit: Innovate With AI: The Future Enterprise Application-Driven Intelligence: Defining the Next Wave of Modern Apps AI-Driven Real-Time Pricing with MongoDB and Vertex AI

November 7, 2024