 Welcome back to NYC, the Cube'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 Robby Belson who's the developer relations lead at Verizon and Ian Masingham who's the vice president of developer relations at MongoDB. Jens, good to see you. It's great to be here. So Robby, 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 Ray Zondeta, is developers. Start there. Why is Mongo so developer friendly from your perspective? Well, it's been the ethos of MongoDB since day one. You know, 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. You know, 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 100 cloud regions across AWS, GCP and Azure and that adoption number is now running at about 25,000 developers a week. So, you know, 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. You know, Ravi, sometimes there's an analyst that 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 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, well, wait a minute, 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 was more than 40% faster for thousands and thousands of rights that 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. Well, it's interesting, you talk about the performance. 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 it can play in a lot of different places. So, you guys both have developer relations in Utah. Is that how you met some formal developer relations? We were on a 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. 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 is 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. 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 that 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, you know, to me, you know, there's a lot of Edge use cases, you know, 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 Edge-like. 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 can have a private network and private mobile Edge computing by way of, say, an AWS app post, and then public mobile Edge computing by way of AWS wavelength. 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. You're describing what we've been expecting is a new architecture emerging, and that's going to probably bring new economics, new use cases, right? Where are we today in that, first of all, is that a reasonable premise? This is sort of a new architecture that's being built out, and where are we in that build out? How do you think about the future of that? Absolutely. It's definitely early days. I think we're still trying to 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, was hypothesis that was validated by developers that we can continue to build out, but we recognize that we can't get that static, we got to keep evolving. So, one of our newest ideas as 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 that's 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 principle's build of MongoDB with performance and scalability in mind is actually really important here. So is that a lighter weight instance of Mongo or not necessarily? No, not necessarily, no, no, not necessarily. We do have Edge caching with Realm, the mobile databases Robbie's already mentioned, but the core databases 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 super cloud. So super cloud, 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 primitive, it's 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 cluster environment that you run across to different providers. And then for the abstraction layer, 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 cloud. It's a 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 don't know if we 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'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 super cloud. 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, meaning developers where they are, providing those idiomatic interfaces to interact with our APIs, so think the edge discovery, but not in a silo, within Atlas Functions. 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 because that's really what it is, the super cloud. Does the security model, how does the security model evolve with that? 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. A 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 memory, so your data is decrypted while it's resident in memory on your database engine, and 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 obscured 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 10 records, but you've got a million encrypted records, you have to pull a million encrypted records to the client, decrypt them all and see it through. 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 with a first commercial database provided 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? 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 build out learning journeys. So one of my favorite moments with Mongo was an immersion day we had hosted earlier last year where we are from an enterprise perspective, we're focused on B2B apps, but there's nothing stopping us from building a B2C app based on the theme of the Winter Olympics at the time. You could take a picture of Shawn 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 a little Trumpeteer. Congratulations 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 and impossible for developers to get this wrong. You want to make it as easy as possible for developers to deal with cryptography and that of course is what we're trying to do with our driver technology combined with structured encryption with queryable encryption. Rob, 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 were 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 an immersion day features and 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 that 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 Bomers said, screamed 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, thank you. 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.