New to MongoDB Atlas: More Azure Regions, Monitoring Metrics via the API, Cross-Project Restores, Test Failover

Sahir Azam
September 14, 2017 | Updated: June 1, 2021
#Releases#Cloud

Earlier this year, we announced the availability of our cloud database service, MongoDB Atlas, with global support for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

And since then, we’ve been humbled by the overwhelming reception from the global community of MongoDB users. Customers like Ticketek — Australia’s largest ticketing company in sports and entertainment — which now uses MongoDB Atlas to support the core transactional systems needed to power their multi-channel ticket sales and distribution network.

“Everyone knows Ticketek from an A/NZ perspective, but we’re also delivering tickets in the US and UK and we recently bought the largest ticketing company in Malaysia,” explained Matt Cudworth, CTO of TEG, Ticketek’s parent company, in an interview with itnews.com.au.

“Atlas became an obvious choice for us to be able to deliver [services] in most regions. We can use different cloud providers, and you can’t go past [a managed service by] the vendor that makes the software. There’s no better expert in that technology.”

More Atlas Regions on Microsoft Azure

Today, we’re excited to announce that MongoDB Atlas now supports 23 Azure regions across the world. This will grant the increasing number of MongoDB users looking for a cloud database service global low latency connectivity and the ability to meet data sovereignty requirements.

New MongoDB Atlas regions on Microsoft Azure

You can now deploy clusters with MongoDB Atlas in 41 regions across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Log in to your account to see the full region list.

New MongoDB Atlas Features

We’ve also been working on adding features based on user feedback. Here are just a few quick highlights:

Support for monitoring metrics and logs via Atlas API

You can now obtain fine-grained monitoring metrics on database processes and the underlying instances via the MongoDB Atlas API. In addition, the API will allow you to retrieve log files for a particular host.

Cross-project restores

You can now perform backup restores into a different Project (formerly Group) than the backup snapshot source. This allows you to easily execute tasks such as creating multiple staging or test environments that match recent production data with different user access privileges or in different regions.

Test failover / “Chaos” button

Modern cloud applications should be designed for high availability despite instance failures. With the new “Test Failover” button — available for all dedicated clusters — MongoDB Atlas will trigger a replica set failover and subsequent election, helping you test redundancy and ensure that your application connection handling is resilient.

All of these new features are now live in MongoDB Atlas. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback at mongodb-atlas@mongodb.com.

Not an Atlas user yet? Get started with a 512MB database for free.

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Personalized Customer Experience Made Simple & Secure

Sitecore as a Service from Avanade and MongoDB In today’s connected world, customers are more informed and demanding than ever before. Brands are judged as much by the experience they deliver to their customers as they are for their products or services. These expectations raise the stakes for people managing these brands. No longer can marketing teams rely on the straight and narrow customer journey to reach the target audience. They need to go the extra mile to build a personalized and secure experience for each of our customers. Whether the customer is browsing on the company website, interacting on social media, or chatting with a customer service representative, each touch point provides an opportunity to delight the customer as well as collect data to gain valuable insights. These insights can then be leveraged to deliver an enhanced, more tailored experience at the next interaction, improving the outcome of the customer journey. However, achieving such sophistication requires marketing teams to be equipped with a technology that offers rich data management and analytical capabilities. Sitecore has emerged as one such powerful technology. Technology teams can leverage Sitecore to empower business users with the capabilities to deliver personalized experiences and derive meaningful insights. Built on MongoDB, Sitecore Experience Database (xDB) is a huge marketing data repository that collects all customer interactions, connecting them to create a comprehensive, unified view of the individual customer. This unified view can be used to automate the delivery of a personalized customer experience across all channels. As the core component of Sitecore xDB, MongoDB provides a scalable data platform to store and analyze all data from any channel and any touchpoint in real time. Although powerful, we often observe that getting the most out of a Sitecore implementation requires careful planning, implementation, migration of existing data, delivery, and continuous operations. At the same time, it's essential to ensure that business users face no disruptions while relying on large scale Sitecore xDB deployments. This is why MongoDB and Avanade have partnered to offer enterprises a comprehensive, hassle-free, cloud-based managed service for Sitecore on the MongoDB Atlas . The solution is delivered and managed by Avanade , Sitecore’s largest partner and it’s only global platinum solutions partner. It is powered by MongoDB Atlas , engineered and hosted by the same team that builds the MongoDB database. For those who do not want to run MongoDB for Sitecore xDB in the cloud, we also provide MongoDB Enterprise Advanced which includes the same capabilities but within your own data center or private cloud. Managing backend infrastructure for your Sitecore deployment by yourself can prove to be a major distraction. We often hear from our customers that dealing with operational challenges takes away focus from the main priority of continuously delivering an enhanced and personalized experience. As Sitecore is a real-time workload, operating it at scale can prove to be even more demanding. MongoDB and Avanade joint solution is purpose built to eliminate such distractions. You no longer need to juggle between the priorities of providing a high performance, secure, always-on experience and rapidly delivering new capabilities. Moreover, to make things simple, our solution provides a single line of support for Sitecore, MongoDB, and Microsoft Azure. “As a fully managed service designed and built for the cloud, our offering gives leading businesses and brands the agility and flexibility to grow as their business grows with the unique assurances large organizations require. Moreover, our expertise with MongoDB Atlas and Azure will help you ensure success at each stage of the Sitecore deployment lifecycle.” - Justin Calvo, Executive, Digital Marketing Platform, Services & Offerings, Avanade We also understand that you need to protect your brand while delivering an uninterrupted personalized experience anytime, anywhere. This means that your data platform needs to be secure, reliable, and scalable. MongoDB Atlas addresses those requirements to provide the best data platform to run Sitecore xDB in the cloud. Also available on Azure, Atlas is an automated cloud service for MongoDB that is secure and highly available by default. It incorporates the operational best practices that MongoDB has learned from optimizing thousands of deployments across startups and the Fortune 100. As your data and performance needs grow, Atlas can elastically scale to match changing needs without any disruptions. To keep your deployment up to date, patches are applied automatically, and upgrades can also be performed without any downtime. It also offers continuous backup with point in time recovery, so that you don’t lose any customer touchpoints. As your Sitecore implementation matures, you might want to develop advanced functionalities. MongoDB’s analytics capabilities and Avanade’s expertise can further help you develop these sophisticated functionalities. For instance, organizations can leverage MongoDB Connector for Apache Spark to perform deep analytics on live operational data in MongoDB to update customer classifications and personalize offers in real time. To get the most out of your Sitecore investment, you must also ensure that your Sitecore deployment is tailored to address specific business needs. With over 1,300 trained Sitecore specialists and more than 250 clients spanning 21 countries, you can trust Avanade’s expertise in designing, delivering, and managing large scale Sitecore implementations. Migrating to our solution is also easy. Existing Sitecore xDB can migrate their existing MongoDB deployments, either from on-premises or any other cloud, to MongoDB Atlas with live migration . Additionally, Avanade has specialized migration and integration practices to help start empowering business users faster. Together, Avanade and MongoDB are committed to helping enterprises and brands drive their digital and CMS strategy by implementing, deploying and managing Sitecore xDB with minimal friction. MongoDB and Avanade have not only helped the organizations integrate MongoDB, the data layer for Sitecore xDB, across operational, system of record and digital applications, but also perform sophisticated analytics. All of this without requiring the customer to invest time and money in developing and maintaining in-house skills. Visit this page to learn more about how we can help you get the most out of Sitecore xDB. --- Adam Burden, Senior Managing Director of Accenture Technology, talks about how Accenture (including Avanade) and MongoDB are working together to help enterprises create a competitive advantage through digital transformation.

September 13, 2017
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Data and the European Landscape: 3 Trends for 2022

The past two years have brought massive changes for IT leaders: large and complex cloud migrations; unprecedented numbers of people suddenly working, shopping and learning from home; and a burst in demand for digital-first experiences. Like everyone else, we are hoping that 2022 isn’t so disruptive (fingers crossed!), our customer conversations in Europe do lead us to believe the new year will bring new business priorities. We’re already noticing changes in conversations around vendor lock-in, thanks to the Digital Markets Act, a new enthusiasm for combining operational and analytical data to drive new insights faster, and a more strategic embrace of sustainability. Here’s how we see these trends playing out in 2022. Digital markets act draws new attention to cloud vendor lock-in in Europe We’ve heard plenty about the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act , which, in the name of ensuring fair and open digital markets, would place new restrictions on companies that are deemed to be digital “gatekeepers” in the region. That discussion will be nothing compared to the vigorous debate we expect once the EU begins the very tricky political business of determining exactly which companies will fall under the act. If the EU sets the bar for revenues, users, and market size high enough, it’s possible that the regulation will end up affecting only Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. But a European group representing 2,500 CIOs and almost 700 organizations is now pushing to have the regulation encompass more software companies. Their main concern centers around “distorted competition” in cloud infrastructure services and a worry that companies are being locked into one cloud vendor. A trend that will likely increase in 2022 that pushes back on cloud vendor lock-in is embracing multi-cloud strategies. We should expect to see more organisations in the region pursuing multi-cloud environments as a means to improve business continuity and agility whilst being able to access best of breed services from each cloud provider. As we have always said …”it’s fine to date your cloud provider….but don’t ever marry them.” The convergence of operational and analytical data The processing of operational and analytical data is almost always contained in different data systems, each tuned to that use case and managed by separate teams. But because that data lives in separate places, it’s almost impossible for organisations to generate insights and automate actions in real time, against live data. We believe 2022 is the year we’ll see a critical mass of companies in the region make significant progress toward a convergence of their operational and analytical data. We’re already starting to see some of the principles of microservices in operational applications, such as domain ownership, be applied to analytics as well. We’re hearing about this from so many of our customers locally, who are looking at MongoDB as an application data platform that allows them to perform queries across both real-time and historical data, using a unified platform and a single query API. This results in the applications they are building becoming more intelligent and contextual to their users, while avoiding dependencies on centralized analytics teams that otherwise slow down how quickly new, data-driven experiences can be released. Sustainability drives local strategic IT choice Technology always has some environmental cost. Sometimes that’s obvious — such as the energy needs and emissions associated with Bitcoin mining. More often, though, the environmental costs are well hidden. The European Green Deal commits the European Union to reducing emissions by 55% by 2030, with a focus on sustainable industry. With the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26) recently completed in Glasgow, and coming off the hottest European summer on record, climate issues have become top of mind. That means our customers are increasingly looking to make their technical operations more sustainable — including in their choice of cloud provider and data centers. According to research from IDC , more than 20% of CxOs say that sustainability is now important in selecting a strategic cloud service provider, and some 29% of CxOs are including sustainability into their RFPs for cloud services. Most interesting, 26% say they are willing to switch to providers with better sustainability credentials. Historically, it’s been difficult to make a switch like that. That’s part of the reason we built MongoDB Atlas — to give our customers the flexibility to run in any region , with any of the three largest cloud providers, and to make it easy to switch between them, and even to run a single database cluster across them. Publicly available information about the footprint of individual regions and even single data centers will make it simpler for companies to make informed decisions. Already, at least one cloud platform has added indicators to regions with the lowest carbon footprint. Source: IDC, European Customers Engage Services Providers at All Stages of Their Cloud Journey, IDC Survey Spotlight, Doc #EUR248484021, Dec 2021

December 21, 2021