MACH Aligned for Retail: Cloud-Native SaaS

Silvio Sola and Genevieve Broadhead
September 22, 2022 | Updated: June 27, 2023
#Retail

MongoDB is an active member of the MACH Alliance, a non-profit cooperation of technology companies fostering the adoption of composable architecture principles promoting agility and innovation.

Each letter in the MACH acronym corresponds to a different concept that should be leveraged when modernizing heritage solutions and creating brand-new experiences. MACH stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless. In previous articles in this series, we explored the importance of Microservices and the API-first approach.

Here, we will focus on the third principle championed by the alliance: Cloud-native SaaS. Let’s dive in.

What is cloud-native SaaS?

Cloud-native SaaS solutions are vendor-managed applications developed in and for the cloud, and leveraging all the capabilities the cloud has to offer, such as fully managed hosting, built-in security, auto-scaling, cross-regional deployment, automatic updates, built-in analytics, and more.

Why is cloud-native SaaS important for retail?

Retailers are pressed to transform their digital offerings to meet rapidly shifting consumer needs and remain competitive. Traditionally, this means establishing areas of improvement for your systems and instructing your development teams to refactor components to introduce new capabilities (e.g., analytics engines for personalization or mobile app support) or to streamline architectures to make them easier to maintain (e.g., moving from monolith to microservices). These approaches can yield good results but require a substantial investment in time, budget, and internal technical knowledge to implement.

Now, retailers have an alternative tool at their disposal: Cloud-native SaaS applications. These solutions are readily available off-the-shelf and require minimal configuration and development effort. Adopting them as part of your technology stack can accelerate the transformation and time to market of new features, while not requiring specific in-house technical expertise.

Many cloud-native SaaS solutions focused on retail use cases are available (see Figure 1), including Vue Storefront, which provides a front-end presentation layer for ecommerce, and Amplience, which enables retailers to customize their digital experiences.

Collection of company logos of MACH Alliance members who provide retail solutions
Figure 1: Some MACH Alliance members providing retail solutions.

At the same time, in-house development should not be totally discarded, and you should aim to strike the right balance between the two options based on your objectives. Figure 2 shows pros and cons of the two approaches:

Pros and cons list for cloud-native SaaS and in-house approaches
Figure 2: Pros and cons of cloud-native SaaS and in-house approaches.

MongoDB is a great fit for cloud-native SaaS applications

MongoDB’s product suite is cloud-native by design and is a great fit if your organization is adopting this principle, whether you prefer to run your database on-premises, leveraging MongoDB Community and Enterprise Advanced, or as SaaS with MongoDB Atlas.

MongoDB Atlas, our developer data platform, is particularly suitable in this context. It supports the three major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and leverages the cloud platforms’ features to achieve cloud-native principles and design:

  • Auto-deployment & auto-healing: DB clusters are provisioned, set up, and healed automatically, reducing operational and DBA efforts.

  • Automatically scalable: Built-in auto-scaling capabilities enable the database RAM, CPU, and storage to scale up or down depending on traffic and data volume. A MongoDB Serverless instance allows abstracting the infrastructure even further, by paying only for the resources you need.

  • Globally distributed: The global nature of the retail industry requires data to be efficiently distributed to ensure high availability and compliance with data privacy regulations, such as GDPR, while implementing strict privacy controls. MongoDB Atlas leverages the flexibility of the cloud with its replica set architecture and multi-cloud support, meaning that data can be easily distributed to meet complex requirements

  • Secure from the start: Network isolation, encryption, and granular auditing capabilities ensure data is only accessible to authorized individuals, thereby maintaining confidentiality.

  • Always up to date: Security patches and minor upgrades are performed automatically with no intervention required from your team. Major releases can be integrated effortlessly, without modifying the underlying OS or working with package files.

  • Monitorable and reliable: MongoDB Atlas distributes a set of utilities that provides real-time reporting of database activities to monitor and improve slow queries, visualize data traffic, and more. Backups are also fully managed, ensuring data integrity.

Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) increasingly rely on capabilities like these to build cloud-native SaaS applications addressing retail use cases. For example, Commercetools offers a fully managed ecommerce platform underpinned by MongoDB Atlas (see Figure 3). Their end-to-end solution provides retailers with the tools to transform their ecommerce capabilities in a matter of days, instead of building a solution in-house. Commercetools is also a MACH Alliance member, fully embracing composable architecture paradigms explored in this series.

Adopting Commercetools as your ecommerce platform of choice lets you automatically scale your ecommerce as traffic increases, and it integrates with many third-party systems, ranging from payment platforms to front-end solutions. Additionally, its headless nature and strong API layer allow your front-end to be adapted based on your brands, currencies, and geographies.

Commercetools runs on and natively ingests data from MongoDB. Leveraging MongoDB for your other home-grown applications means that you can standardize your data estate, while taking advantage of the many capabilities that the MongoDB data platform has to offer. The same principles can be applied to other SaaS solutions running on MongoDB.

Figure 3: MongoDB Atlas and Commercetools capabilities.

Find out more about the MongoDB partnership with Commercetools.

Learn how Commercetools enabled Audi to integrate its in-car commerce solution and adapt it to 26 countries.

MongoDB supports your home-grown applications

MongoDB offers a powerful developer data platform, providing the tools to leverage composable architecture patterns and build differentiating experiences in-house. The same benefits of MongoDB’s cloud-native architecture explored earlier are also applicable in this context and are leveraged by many retailers globally, such as Conrad Electronics, running their B2B ecommerce platform on MongoDB Atlas.

Summary

Cloud-native principles are an essential component of modern systems and applications. They support ISVs in developing powerful SaaS applications and can be leveraged to build proprietary systems in-house. In both scenarios, MongoDB is strongly positioned to deliver on the cloud-native capabilities that should be expected from a modern data platform.

Thank you to Ainhoa Múgica and Karolina Ruiz Rogelj for their contributions to this post.

Stay tuned for our final blog of this series on Headless and check out our previous blogs on Microservices and API-first.

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How a Data Mesh Facilitates Open Banking

Open banking shows signs of revolutionizing the financial world. In response to pressure from regulators, consumers, or both, banks around the world continue to adopt the central tenet of open banking: Make it easy for consumers to share their financial data with third-party service providers and allow those third parties to initiate transactions. To meet this challenge, banks need to transition from sole owners of financial data and the customer relationship to partners in a new, distributed network of services. Instead of competing with other established banks, they now compete with fintech startups and other non-bank entities for consumer attention and the supply of key services. Despite fundamental shifts in both the competition and the customer relationship, however, open banking offers a huge commercial opportunity, which we’ll look at more closely in this article. After all, banks still hold the most important currency in this changing landscape: trust. Balancing data protection with data sharing Established banks hold a special position in the financial system. Because they are long-standing, heavily regulated, and backed by government agencies that guarantee deposits (e.g., the FDIC in the United States), established banks are trusted by consumers over fintech startups when it comes to making their first forays into open banking. A study by Mastercard of 4,000 U.S. and Canadian consumers found that the majority (55% and 53%, respectively) strongly trusted banks with their financial data. Only 32% of U.S. respondents and 19% of Canadians felt the same way about fintech startups. This position of trust extends to the defensive and risk-averse stance of established banks when it comes to sharing customer data. Even when sharing data internally, these banks have strict, permission-based data access controls and risk-management practices. They also maintain extensive digital audit trails. Open banking challenges these traditional data access practices, however, causing banks to move to a model where end customers are empowered to share their sensitive financial data with a growing number of third parties. Some open banking standards, such as Europe’s Payment Services Directive (PSD2), specifically promote informed consent data sharing, further underlining the shift to consumers as the ultimate stewards of their data. At the same time, banks must comply with evolving global privacy laws, such as Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These laws add another layer of risk and complexity to data sharing, granting consumers (or “data subjects” in GDPR terms) the right to explicit consent before data is shared, the right to withdraw that consent, data portability rights, and the right to erasure of that data — the famed “right to be forgotten.” In summary, banks are under pressure from regulators and consumers to make data more available, and customers now make the final decision about which third parties will receive that data. Banks are also responsible for managing: Different levels of consent for different types of data The ability to redact certain sensitive fields in a data file, while still sharing the file Compliance with data privacy laws, including "the right to be forgotten" The open opportunity for banks In spite of the competition and added risks for established banks, open banking greatly expands the global market of customers, opens up new business models and services, and creates new ways to grow customer relationships. In an open banking environment, banks can leverage best-of-breed services from third parties to bolster their core banking services and augment their online and mobile banking experiences. Established banks can also create their own branded or “white label” services, like payment platforms, and offer them as services for others to use within the open banking ecosystem. For customers, the ability of third parties to get access to a true 360-degree view of their banking and payment relationships creates new insights that banks would not have been able to generate with just their own data. Given the risks, and the huge potential rewards, how do banks satisfy the push and pull of data sharing and data protection? How do they systematically collect, organize, and publish the most relevant data from across the organization for third parties to consume? Banks need a flexible data architecture that enables the deliberate collection and sharing of customer data both internally and externally, coupled with fine-grained access, traceability, and data privacy controls down to the individual field level. At the same time, this new approach must also provide a speed of development and flexibility that limits the cost of compliance with these new regulations and evolving open banking standards. Rise of the data mesh Open banking requires a fundamental change in a bank’s data infrastructure and its relationship with data. The technology underlying the relational databases and mainframes in use at many established banks was first developed in the 1970s. Conceived long before the cloud computing era, these technologies were never intended to support the demands of open banking, nor the volume, variety, and velocity of data that banks must deal with today. Banks are overcoming these limitations and embracing open banking by remodeling their approach to data and by building a data mesh using a modern developer data platform. What is a data mesh? A data mesh is an architectural framework that helps banks decentralize their approach to sharing and governing data, while also enabling self-service consumption of that data. It achieves this by grouping a bank’s data into domains. Each domain in a data mesh contains related data from across the bank. For example, a "consumer" domain may contain data about accounts, addresses, and relationship managers from across every department of the bank. Each data domain is owned by a different internal stakeholder group or department within the bank, and these owners are responsible for collecting, cleansing, and distributing the data in their domain across the enterprise and to consumers. With open banking, domain owners are also responsible for sharing data to third parties. This decentralized, end-to-end approach to data ownership encourages departments within the bank to adopt a “product-like” mentality toward the data within their domain, ensuring that it is maintained and made available like any other service or product they deliver. For this reason, the term data-as-a-product is synonymous with data mesh. Data domain owners are also expected to: Create and maintain relevant reshaped copies of data, rather than pursue a single-source-of-truth or canonical model. Serve data by exposing data product APIs. This means doing the cleansing and curation of data as close as possible to the source, rather than moving data through complex data pipelines to multiple environments. The successful implementation of a data mesh, and the adoption of a data-as-a-product culture, requires a fundamental understanding of localized data. It also requires proper documentation, design, management, and, most important, flexibility, as in the ability to extend the internal data model. The flexibility of the document model is, therefore, critical for success. Conclusion Open banking holds great potential for the future of the customer experience, and will help established financial institutions meet the ever-evolving customer expectations. Facilitated by a data mesh, you can open new doors for responsible, efficient data sharing across your financial institution, and this increase in data transparency leads to better outcomes for your customers—and your bottom line. Want to learn more about the benefits of open banking? Watch the panel discussion Open Banking: Future-Proof Your Bank in a World of Changing Data and API Standards .

September 22, 2022
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MongoDB Named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems

I’m pleased to announce that MongoDB has been named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMSs) for the third consecutive year. In our view, this recognition cements MongoDB’s status as the only pure-play database provider in the cloud database management system category, underscoring MongoDB’s innovation, execution, and customer-centric approach. According to Gartner, “The cloud DBMS market remains as vibrant as ever and is transforming in important ways, especially in the use of gen AI and how DBMSs interact with other data management components. This Magic Quadrant will help data and analytics leaders make the right cloud DBMS choices in this essential market.” We believe this continued recognition by Gartner is a testament to MongoDB’s commitment to serving developers, as well as the investments we’ve made in our unified platform and integrated services. Driving innovation for enterprises MongoDB's mission is to empower innovators to create, transform, and disrupt industries by unleashing the power of software and data. 2024 was a year of innovation and accolades at MongoDB, and I’m proud to share some of its highlights: In October, we released MongoDB 8.0 , the best performing version of MongoDB yet. MongoDB 8.0 is over 30% faster than the previous version of the database, it’s more secure than ever, horizontal scaling is faster and easier (at a lower cost), and MongoDB 8.0 gives teams greater control for optimizing database performance. We also launched—and grew—the MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP) . With MAAP, MongoDB offers customers a full AI stack and an integrated set of professional services to help them keep pace with innovation, identify the best AI use cases, and to help them future-proof AI investments. MongoDB became a founding member of the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute Consortium . Established by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Consortium supports the development and deployment of safe and trustworthy AI. MongoDB released hundreds of features and enhancements to accelerate innovation, manage costs, and simplify building applications at scale. MongoDB was recognized as the most loved vector database in Retool’s State of AI report —for the second consecutive year. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for cloud database management systems “Gartner defines the cloud database management systems (DBMSs) market as solutions designed to store, manipulate, and persist data, primarily delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). These systems must support transactional, analytical, and hybrid workloads while enabling enterprises to innovate across multi-cloud, hybrid, and intercloud ecosystems.” 1 It’s our opinion that this recognition by Gartner is a testament to MongoDB’s strong ability to execute and support customers today, as well as MongoDB’s comprehensive product vision that positions our platform to support tomorrow's operational workloads. What is the Magic Quadrant, and what is a Leader? “A Gartner Magic Quadrant is a culmination of research in a specific market, giving you a wide-angle view of the relative positions of the market’s competitors.  By applying a graphical treatment and a uniform set of evaluation criteria, a Magic Quadrant helps you quickly ascertain how well technology providers are executing their stated visions and how well they are performing against Gartner’s market view.” 2 According to Gartner, “Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow.” Overall, Magic Quadrants can help you “get quickly educated about a market’s competing technology providers and their ability to deliver on what end-users require now and in the future.” Powering innovation at scale with MongoDB Atlas Enterprises choose MongoDB Atlas because it gives them the freedom and agility they need to succeed in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. MongoDB Atlas’s multi-cloud architecture—including availability across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure—ensures customers can design for unmatched scale and resilience. By automating functions like scaling and performance optimization , and giving them the ability to leverage industry-first capabilities like MongoDB Queryable Encryption (which allows customers to encrypt, store, and perform queries directly on data), with MongoDB Atlas customers can spend less time managing infrastructure and more time delivering experiences. MongoDB Atlas’s integrated capabilities to support multi-modal data types and use cases—like full-text and vector search , stream processing , and data federation —accelerate innovation, helping enterprises quickly respond to market changes, power AI-driven insights, and deliver meaningful digital experiences to their end users—all without the burden of operational complexity. Modernizing and building for the future In our opinion, the Gartner Magic Quadrant provides organizations with a clear and accessible evaluation framework to identify solutions that fit their needs, today and tomorrow. The placement of MongoDB in the Leader quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems—for the third year in a row!—validates the efforts MongoDB has made to help developers and organizations take advantage of their most valuable resource, their data. I talk to MongoDB customers frequently, and many say the same thing: in today’s digital-first economy, AI-powered applications and scalable data infrastructure aren’t just advantages, they’re absolute necessities. They say that the time to act is now, and they’re looking for solutions that will help them innovate, streamline, and seize the AI-driven future. And when it comes to modernizing their operations, they consistently point to MongoDB as their go-to partner. Begin your cloud journey with MongoDB Atlas today. Contact our sales team or register for a free account to begin building! And to learn how MongoDB can help accelerate your AI journey, visit the MongoDB AI Applications Program page. Footnotes Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems,  Henry Cook, Ramke Ramakrishnan, et al., 18 December 2024 GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 1 Gartner Peer Insights, Cloud Database Management Systems, December 2024 https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/cloud-database-management-systems 2 Gartner Research Methodologies, Gartner Magic Quadrant, 20 December 2024 https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/magic-quadrants-research

December 23, 2024