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>> Welcome back to NYC, theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB 2022,
a few thousand people here at least,
bigger than many people perhaps expected,
and a lot of buzz going on and we're going to talk devs.
I'm really excited to welcome back, Robbie Belson,
who's the Developer Relations Lead at Verizon.
And Ian Massingham,
who's the Vice President of Developer Relations at MongoDB.
Gents, good to see you.
>> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having me.
>> So, Robbie, we just met a few weeks ago
at the Red Hat Summit in Boston,
and was blown away by what Verizon
is doing in developer land.
And of course, Ian,
Mongo it's raison d'etre is developers start there.
Why is Mongo so developer-friendly from your perspective?
>> Well, it's been the ethos of MongoDB since day one.
Back when we launched the first version
of MongoDB, back in 2009,
we've always been about making developers lives easier.
And then in 2016, we announced and released MongoDB Atlas,
which is our cloud managed service for MongoDB,
starting with a small number of regions,
built on top of AWS
and about 2,500 adoption events per week,
for MongoDB Atlas after the first year.
Today, MongoDB Atlas provides a managed service
for MongoDB developers around the world.
We're present in almost a 100 cloud regions
across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
And that adoption number is now running
at about 25,000 developers a week
so the proof is really in the metrics.
MongoDB is an incredibly popular platform for developers
that want to build data-centric applications.
You just can't argue with the metrics really.
>> Robbie, sometimes as an analyst
you come up with these theories
and one of the theories I've been spouting for a long time,
is that developers are going to win the edge.
And now to see you at Verizon
building out this developer community
was really exciting to me.
So, explain how you got this,
started with this journey.
>> Absolutely as you think about Verizon 5G Edge,
or Mobile Edge Computing portfolio,
we knew from the start that developers
would play a central role
in not only consuming the service,
but shaping the roadmap
for what it means to build a 5G future.
And so we started this journey back in late 2019
and fast forward to about a year ago with Mongo we realized,
"Wait a minute,
you look at the core service offerings
available at the edge."
We didn't know really what to do with data.
We wanted to figure it out.
We wanted the vote of confidence from developers.
So, there I was in an apartment in Colorado
racing your open source Mongo against that in the region
Edge versus region, what would you see?
And we saw tremendous performance improvements.
It was so much faster.
It's more than 40% faster
for thousands and thousands of rights.
And we said,
"Well, wait a minute, there's something here."
So, what often starts as
an organic developer-led intuition or hypothesis
can really expand to a much broader go-to-market motion
that really brings in the enterprise
and that's been our strategy from day one.
>> Dave: Well, it's interesting
you talk about the performance
so I just got off of a session talking about
benchmarks in the financial services industry,
amazing numbers.
And that's one of the hallmarks of Mongo
is that can play in a lot of different places.
So, you guys both have developer relations in your title.
Is that how you met,
some formal developer relations program?
>> Yeah, I would say that Verizon
is one of the few customers
that we also collaborate with
on a developer relations effort.
It's in our mutual best interest
to try to drive MongoDB consumption amongst developers
using Verizon's 5G Edge network and their platform.
So of course we work together
to help to increase awareness of MongoDB
amongst mobile developers that want to use
that kind of technology.
>> Dave: So, what's your story on this?
>> I mean, as I mentioned,
everything starts with an organic developer discovery.
It all started,
I just cold messaged a developer advocate on Twitter
and here we are at MongoDB World.
It's amazing how things turn out.
But one of the things that's really resonated with me
as I was speaking with one of your leads
within your organization,
and they were mentioning that
as MongoDB had developed over the years,
the mantra really became
we want to make software development easy.
>> Yep. >> And that really stuck
with me because from a network perspective,
we want to make networking easy.
Developers are not going to care about
the internals of 5G network.
In fact, they want us to abstract away those complexities
so they can focus on building their apps.
So, what better co-innovation opportunity,
than taking MongoDB,
making software easy,
and we make the network easy.
>> So how do you think about the edge?
How does...
I mean, to me, there's a lot of edge use cases,
think about the Home Depot or Lowe's.
Okay, great.
I can put like a little mini data center in there.
That's cool, that's edgelike.
But when I think of Verizon,
I mean you got cell towers,
you've got the far edge.
How do you think about edge, Robbie?
>> Well, the edge is I believe
a very ambiguous term by design.
The edge is the device, the mobile device, an IoT device.
It could be the radio towers that you mentioned.
It could be the metro edge, the CDN.
No one edge is better than the other.
They're all just serving different use cases.
So when we talk about the edge,
we're focused on the mobile edge,
which we believe is most conducive to B2B applications.
A fleet of IoT devices that you can control.
A manufacturing plant.
A fleet of ground and aerial robotics.
And in doing so you can create a powerful compute mesh
where you could have a private network
and private Mobile Edge Computing,
by way of say an AWS Outpost,
and then public Mobile Edge Computing
by way of AWS Wavelength.
And why keep them separate?
You could have a single compute mesh even with MongoDB
and this is something that we've been exploring.
You can extend Atlas, take a cluster,
leave it in the region,
and then use Realm, the mobile portfolio,
and spread it all across the edge
so you're creating that unified compute
and data mesh together.
>> So you're describing
what we've been expecting is a new architecture emerging
and that's going to probably bring new economics
of new use cases, right?
Where are we today in that...
First of all, is that a reasonable premise,
that this is a sort of a new architecture
that's being built out
and where are we in that buildout?
How do you think about the future of that?
>> Absolutely, it's definitely early days,
I think we're still tryna figure it out
but the architecture is definitely changing.
The idea, to rip out a mobile device,
that was initially built and envisioned for the device
and only for the device, and say,
"Well, wait a minute,
why can't it live at the edge
and ultimately become multi-tenant
if that's the data volume
that may be produced to each of those Edge zones?"
It was hypothesis, that was validated by developers,
that we continue to build out.
But we recognized that we can't keep that static,
we got to keep evolving.
So one of our newest ideas is we think about,
"Well wait a minute, how can Mongo play in the 5G future?"
We started to get really clever with our 5G network APIs.
And I think we talked about this briefly last time,
5G programmability and network APIs
have been talked about for a while,
but developers haven't had a chance to really use them
and our Edge Discovery Service,
answering the question in this case of
which database is the closest database
doesn't have to be invoked by the device anymore.
You can take a thin client model
and invoke it from the cloud using Atlas functions.
So we're constantly permuting
across the entire portfolio, Edge or otherwise,
for what it means to build at the Edge
and we've seen such tremendous results.
>> So how does Mongo think about the Edge and playing?
We've been wondering,
"Okay which database is actually going to be
positioned best for the Edge?"
>> Well, I think if you've got an
ultra low latency access network using data technology,
that adds latency is probably not a great idea.
So MongoDB since the very formative years
of the company and product has been built
with performance and scalability in mind,
including things like in-memory storage
for the storage engine that we run as well.
So, really trying to match the performance characteristics
of the data infrastructure,
with the evolution in the mobile network
I think is really fundamentally important.
And that first principles build of MongoDB
with performance and scalability in mind
is actually really important here.
>> So, was that a lighter weight instance of Mongo
or not necessarily?
>> No, not necessarily.
No, not necessarily.
We do have Edge caching with Realm,
the mobile databases Robbie's already mentioned,
but the core database has been designed from day one
with those performance
and scalability characteristics in mind.
>> I've been playing around with this.
This is kind of a...
I get a lot of heat for this term, but Supercloud.
So, Supercloud, you might have data on-prem,
you might have data in various clouds,
you're going to have data out at the Edge,
and you've got an abstraction
that allows a developer to tap services
without necessarily
if he or she wants to go deep into the perimeters, great,
but then there's a higher level of services
that they can actually build for their customers.
So, is that a technical reality
from a developer standpoint in your view?
>> We support that with the MongoDB,
multi-cloud deployment model
so you can place MongoDB Atlas nodes
in any one of the three hyperscalers that we mentioned,
AWS, GCP or Azure,
and you can distribute your data
across nodes within a cluster
that is spread across different cloud providers.
So that kind of answers the question about
how you do data placement
inside the MongoDB clustered environment
that you run across the different providers.
And then for the abstraction layer,
when you say that, I hear,
drivers, ODMs, the other intermediary software components
that we provide to make developers
more productive in manipulating data in MongoDB.
This is one of the most interesting things
about the technology.
We're not forcing developers to learn a different dialect
or language in order to interact with MongoDB,
we meet them where they are by providing idiomatic
interfaces to MongoDB in JavaScript, in C-Sharp,
in Python, in Rust,
in fact in 12 different programming languages
that we support as a first party,
plus additional community-contributed programming languages
that the community have created drivers for, ODMs for.
So there's really that model
that you've described in hypothesis,
exists in reality using those different components.
>> It's not just a series of siloed instances
in different clouds-- >> No, it's the fabric,
essentially, yeah.
>> What does the Verizon developer look like?
Where does that individual come from?
We talked about this a little bit a few weeks ago
but I wonder if you could describe it.
>> Absolutely.
My view is that the Verizon
or just mobile edge ecosystem in general for developers
are present at this very conference.
They're everywhere.
They're building apps,
and as Ian mentioned, those idiomatic interfaces.
We need to take our network APIs,
take the infrastructure that's being exposed
and make sure that it's leveraging languages,
frameworks, automation tools,
the likes of Terraform and Beyond.
We want to meet developers where they are
and build tools that are easy for them to use.
And so you had talked about the Supercloud.
I often call it the Cloud Continuum.
So we took it abstraction by abstraction.
We started with, will it work in one edge?
Will it work in multiple edges, public and private?
Will it work in all of the edges
for a given region public or private?
Will it work in multiple regions?
Could it work in multi-clouds?
We've taken it piece by piece by piece
and in doing so abstracting away
the complexity of the network,
meeting developers where they are,
providing those idiomatic interfaces
to interact with our API
so think the Edge Discovery,
but not in a silo,
within Atlas function.
So the way that we're able to converge portfolios
using tools that developers already use, know, and love,
just makes it that much easier.
>> Do you feel like I like the Cloud Continuum,
'cause that's really what it is, the Supercloud.
Does the security model...
How does the security model evolve with that?
>> Robbie: At least, in the context of the mobile edge,
the attack surface is a lot smaller
because it's only for mobile traffic.
Not to say that there couldn't be
various configuration and human error
that could be entertained by a given application experience,
but it is a much more secure
and also reliable environment.
From a failure domain perspective,
there's more edge zones
so it's less conducive to a region-wide failure
because there's so many more availability zones
and that goes hand in hand with security.
>> Thoughts on security from your perspective?
I mean, you added you've made some announcements this week,
the encryption component that you guys announced--
>> Yeah, we issued a press release this morning
about a capability called Queryable Encryption
which actually as we record this,
Mark Porter our CTO is talking about in his keynote,
and this is really the next generation of security
for data stored within databases.
So the trade-off within
field-level encryption within databases
has always been very hard, very, very rigid.
Either you have keys stored within your database,
which means that your data is decrypted
while its resident in memory on your database engine.
This of course allows you to perform
query operations on that data,
or you have keys that are managed and stored in the client
which means the data is permanently
obfuscated from the engine and therefore
you can't offload query capabilities to your data platform,
you've got to do everything in the client.
So if you want ten records,
but you've got a million encrypted records,
you have to pull a million encrypted records to the client,
decrypt them all and sift through--
>> Big performance hit. >> Big performance hit.
What we've got with Queryable Encryption
which we announced today,
is the ability to keep data encrypted
in memory in the engine, in the database,
in the data platform,
issue queries from the client,
but use a technology called Structured Encryption
to allow the database engine to make decisions,
operate queries, and find data,
without ever being able to see it,
without it ever being decrypted in the memory of the engine.
So it's groundbreaking technology
based on research in the field of Structured Encryption,
we're the first commercial database provider
to bring this to market.
>> So how does the mobile edge developer
think about that?
I mean, you hear a lot about shifting left
and not bolting on security.
I mean, is this an example of that?
>> Robbie: It certainly could be.
But I think the mobile edge developer
is still stuck with,
"How does this stuff even work?"
And I think we need to be mindful of that
as we buildout learning journeys.
So one of my favorite moments with Mongo
was on Immersion Day we had hosted earlier last year,
where from an enterprise perspective
we're focused on B2B apps,
but there's nothing stopping us or building a B2C app,
based on the theme of the Winter Olympics, at the time,
you could take a picture of Shaun White, or of Nathan Chen,
and see that it was in fact that athlete
and then overlaid on that web app,
was the number of medals they accrued,
with the little trumpeter congratulating you
for selecting that athlete.
So, I think it's important to build trust
and drive education with developers
with a more simple experience
and then rapidly evolve overlaying the features
that Ian just mentioned over time.
>> I think one of the keys with cryptography is
back to the familiar messaging for the cloud,
offloading heavy-lifting.
You actually need to make it difficult to impossible
for developers to get this wrong,
and you want to make it as easy as possible
for developers to deal with cryptography
and that of course is what we're tryna do
with our driver technology
combined with Structured Encryption
with Queryable Encryption.
>> But Robbie,
your point is lots of opportunity for education.
I mean, I have to say the developers that I work with,
I'm in awe of how they solve problems
and the way they solve problems
if they don't know the answer,
they figure out how to go get it
so how are your two communities and other communities,
how are they coming together to solve such problems
and share whether it's best practices or how do I do this?
>> Well, I'm not going to lie,
in-person events are a bunch of fun,
and one of the easiest
domain knowledge exchange opportunities.
When you're all in person, you can ideate,
you can whiteboard, you can brainstorm.
And often those conversations
are what leads to that infrastructure module
that Immersion Day feature,
it's just amazing what in person events can do,
but community groups of interest,
whether it's a Twitch stream,
whether it's a particular code sample,
we rely heavily on digital means today
to upscale the developer community,
but also build on by means of a simple pull request,
introduce new features
that maybe you weren't even thinking of before.
>> Yeah, that's a really important point
because when you meet people face-to-face
you build a connection
and so if you ask a question
you're more likely perhaps to get an answer,
or if one doesn't exist in a search,
"Oh, hey, we met at the conference
and let's collaborate on this."
Guys, congratulations on this brave new world.
You're in a really interesting spot.
Developers, developers, developers
as Steve Ballmer screamed.
(Ian laughing)
And I was glad to see Dave was not screaming
and jumping up and down on the stage like that
but the message still resonates so thank you.
>> Definitely. >> Appreciate it.
>> All right, keep it right there.
This is Dave Vellante,
for theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022
from New York City.
We'll be right back.
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