>>Welcome back to NYC the Cube's coverage of Mongo DB 2022, a few thousand people here at least bigger than many people, perhaps expected, and a lot of buzz going on and we're gonna talk devs. I'm really excited to welcome back. Robbie Bellson who's the developer relations lead at Verizon and Ian Massingham. Who's the vice president of developer relations at Mongo DB Jens. Good to see you. Great >>To be here. >>Thanks having you. So Robbie, we just met a few weeks ago at the, the red hat summit in Boston and was blown away by what Verizon is doing in, in developer land. And of course, Ian, you know, Mongo it's rayon Detra is, 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 a hundred cloud regions across S DCP and Azure. And that adoption number is now running at about 25,000 developers a week. So, you know, the proof are in proof is really in the metrics. MongoDB is an incredibly popular platform for developers that wanna build data-centric applications. You just can't argue with the metrics really, >>You know, Ravi, sometimes there's an analyst who come up with these theories and one of the theories I've been spouting for a long time is that developers are gonna win the edge. And now to, 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 and 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 20, 19 and fast forward to about a year ago with Mongo, we realized, well, 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 is 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, I just got off of a session talking about benchmarks in the financial services industry, you know, amazing numbers. And that's one of the hallmarks of, of Mongo is it 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? >>We were a >>Program. >>Yeah, I would say that Verizon is one of the few customers that we also collaborate with on a developer relations effort. You know, 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. >>But so what's your story on this? >>I mean, as I, 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, one of your leads within your organization, they were mentioning that as Mongo DVIA developed over the years, the mantra really became, we wanna make software development easy. Yep. And that really stuck with me because from a network perspective, we wanna make networking easy. Developers are not gonna 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 variety? I mean, to me, you know, there's a lot of edge use cases, you know, think about the home Depot or lows. Okay, great. I can put like a little mini data center in there. That's cool. That's 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 a, I believe a very ambiguous term by design. The edge is the device, the mobile device, an IOT device, right? It could be the radio towers that you mentioned. It could be in 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 gonna 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 build out? How, how do you think about the, 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 with hypothesis that was validated by developers that we continue to build out, but we recognize that we can't, we can't get that static. We gotta 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, 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. We've seen such tremendous results. >>So how does Mongo think about the edge and, and, and playing, you know, we've been wondering, okay, which database is actually gonna 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, of Mongo or not >>Necessarily? No, not necessarily. No, no, not necessarily. We do have edge cashing with realm, the mobile databases Robbie's already mentioned, but the core database is 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 Preem. You might have data in various clouds. You're gonna have data out at the edge. And, and you've got an abstraction that allows a developer to, to, to tap services without necessarily if, if he or she wants to go deep into the 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 Mongo DB multi-cloud deployment model. So you can place Mongo DB, 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 kinds of an 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, you know, 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 that in fact in 12 different pro 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 exist in reality, using >>Those different Compli. It's not just a series of siloed instances in, >>In different it's the, it's the fabric essentially. Yeah. >>What, 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 wanna 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, we took it P 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 way, the complexity of the network, meaning 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 functions. So the way that we're able to converge portfolios, using tools that dev developers already use know and love just makes it that much easier. Do, >>Do you feel like I like the cloud continuum cause 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 regionwide failure because there's so many more availability zones. And that goes hand in hand with security. Mm. >>Thoughts on security from your perspective, I mean, you added, you've made some announcements this week, the, the, the encryption component that you guys announced. >>Yeah. We, 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. This allow, 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 OBS from the engine. And therefore you can't offload query capabilities to your data platform. You've gotta 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 performance hit in there. 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 structural 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, is this an example of that? >>It certainly could be, but I think the mobile edge developer still stuck with how does this stuff even work? And I think we need to, 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, our, from an enterprise perspective, we're focused on BW BS, but there's nothing stopping us. You're building a B2C app based on the theme of the winner Olympics. At the time, you could take a picture of Sean 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 trumpeteer 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 wanna 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 structure encryption, with query encryption. >>But Robbie, your point is lots of opportunity for education. I mean, I have to say the developers that I work with, it's, I'm, I'm in awe of how they solve problems and I, and the way they solve problems, if they don't know the answer, they figure out how to go get it. So how, how are your two communities and other communities, you know, how are they coming together to, to solve such problems and share whether it's best practices or how do I do this? >>Well, I'm not gonna 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, by means of a simple port request, introduce new features that maybe you weren't even thinking of before. >>Yeah. You know, 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, in a search, you know, you, oh, Hey, we met at the, at the conference and let's collaborate on this guys. Congratulations on, on this brave new world. You're in a really interesting spot. You know, developers, developers, developers, as Steve bomber says screamed. And I was glad to see Dave was not screaming and jumping up and down on the stage like that, but, but the message still resonates. So thank you, definitely appreciate. All right, keep it right there. This is Dave ante for the cubes coverage of Mago DB world 2022 from New York city. We'll be right back.

>> We're back at the Big Apple, theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. Sahir Azam is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of MongoDB, and Guillermo Rauch who's the CEO of Vercel. Hot off the keynotes from this morning guys, good job. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us here. Thanks for having us. Guillermo when it comes to modern web development, you know the back-end, the cloud guys got to it kind of sewn up, >> you know- >> Guillermo: Forget about it. >> But all the action's in the front end, and that's where you are. Explain Vercel. >> Yeah so Vercel is the company that pioneers front-end development as serverless infrastructure. So we built Next.js which is the most popular React framework in the world. This is what front-end engineers choose to build innovative UI's, beautiful websites. Companies like Dior and GitHub and TikTok and Twitch, which we mentioned in the keynote, are powering their entire dot-coms or all of their new parts of their dot-coms with Next.js. And Vercel is the serverless platform where you can deploy frameworks like in Next.js and others like Svelte and Vue to create really fast experiences on the web. >> So I hear, so serverless, I hear that's the hot trend. You guys made some announcements today. I mean when you look at the, we have spending data with our friends at ETR right down the street. I mean it's just off the charts, whether it's Amazon, Google, Azure Functions, I mean it's just exploding. >> Sahir: Yeah, it's I think in many ways, it's a natural trend. You know, we talk a lot about, whether it be today's keynote or another industry talks you see around our industry that developers are constantly looking for ways to focus on innovation and the business logic that defines their application and as opposed to managing the plumbing, and management of infrastructure. And we've seen this happen over and over again across every layer of the stack. And so for us, you know MongoDB, we have a bit of, you know sort of a lens of a broad spectrum of the market. We certainly have you know, large enterprises that are modernizing existing kind of core systems, then we have developers all over the world who are building the next big best thing. And that's what led us to partner with Vercel is just the bleeding edge of developers building in a new way, in a much more efficient way. And we wanted to make sure we provide a data platform that fits naturally in the way they want to work. >> So explain to our audience the trade-offs of serverless, and I want to get into sort of how you've resolved that. And then I want to hear from Guillermo, what that means for developers. >> Sahir: Yeah in our case, we don't view it as an either or, there are certain workloads and definitely certain companies that will gravitate towards a more traditional database infrastructure where they're choosing the configuration of their cluster. They want full control over it. And that provides, you know, certain benefits around cost predictability or isolation or perceived benefits at least of those things. And customers will gravitate towards that. Now on the flip side, if you're building a new application or you want the ability to scale seamlessly and not have to worry about any of the plumbing, serverless is clearly the easier model. So over the long term, we certainly expect to see as a mix of things, more and more serverless workloads being built on our platform and just generally in the industry, which is why we leaned in so heavily on investing in Atlas serverless. But the flexibility to not be forced into a particular model, but to get the same database experience across your application and even switch between them is an important characteristic for us as we build going forward. >> And you stressed the cost efficiency, and not having to worry about, you know, starting cold. You've architected around that, and what does that mean for a developer? >> Guillermo: For a developer it means that you kind of get the best of both worlds, right? Like you get the best possible performance. Front-end developers are extremely sensitive to this. That's why us pioneering this concept, serverless front-end, has put us in a very privileged position because we have to deliver that really quick time to first buy, that really quick paint. So any of the old trade-offs of serverless are not accepted by the market. You have to be extremely fast. You have to be instant to deliver that front-end content. So what we talked about today for example, with the Vercel Edge network, we're removing all of the cost of that like first hit. That cold start doesn't really exist. And now we're seeing it all across the board, going into the back-end where Mongo has also gotten rid of it. >> Dave: How do you guys collaborate? What's the focus of integration specifically from, you know, an engineering resource standpoint? >> Yeah the main idea is, idea to global app in seconds, right? You have your idea. We give you the framework. We don't give you infrastructure primitives. We give you all the necessary tools to start your application. In practice this means you host it in a Git repo. You import it onto Vercel. You install the Mongo integration. Now your front-end and your data back-end are connected. And then your application just goes global in seconds. >> So, okay. So you've abstracted away the complexity of those primitives, is that correct? >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> Do do developers ever say, "That's awesome but I'd like to get to them every now and then." Or do you not allow that? >> Definitely. We expose all the underlying APIs, and the key thing we hear is that, especially with the push for usage-based billing models, observability is of the essence. So at any time you have to be able to query, in real time, every data point that the platform is observing. We give you performance analytics in real time to see how your front-end is performing. We give you statistics about how often you're querying your back-end and so on, and your cache hit ratios. So what I talked about today in the keynote is, it's not just about throwing more compute at the problem, but the ability to use the edge to your advantage to memoize computation and reuse it across different visits. >> When we think of mission critical historically, you know, you think about going to the ATM, right? I mean a financial transaction. But Mongo is positioning for mission critical applications across a variety of industries. Do we need to rethink what mission critical means? >> I think it's all in the eye of the beholder so to speak. If you're a new business starting up, your software and your application is your entire business. So if you have a cold start latency or God forbid something actually goes down, you don't have a business. So it's just as mission critical to that founder of a new business and new technology as it is, you know, an established enterprise that's running sort of a more, you know, day-to-day application that we may all interact with. So we treat all of those scenarios with equal fervor and importance right? And many times, it's a lot of those new experiences that the become the day-to-day experiences for us globally, and are super important. And we power all of those, whether it be an established enterprise all the way to the next big startup. >> I often talk about COVID as the forced march to digital. >> Sahir: Mm-Hmm. >> Which was obviously a little bit rushed, but if you weren't in digital business, you were out of business. And so now you're seeing people step back and say, "All right, let's be more thoughtful about our digital transformation. We've got some time, we've obviously learned some things made some mistakes." It's all about the customer experience though. And that becomes mission critical right? What are you seeing Guillermo, in terms of the patterns in digital transformation now that we're sort of exiting the isolation economy? >> One thing that comes to mind is, we're seeing that it's not always predictable how fast you're going to grow in this digital economy. So we have customers in the ecommerce space, they do a drop and they're piggybacking on serverless to give them that ability to instantly scale. And they couldn't even prepare for some of these events. We see that a lot with the Web3 space and NFT drops, where they're building in such a way that they're not sensitive to this massive fluctuations in traffic. They're taking it for granted. We've put in so much work together behind the scenes to support it. But the digital native creator just, "Oh things are scaling from one second to the next like I'm hitting like 20,000 requests per second, no problem Vercel is handling it." But the amount of infrastructural work that's gone behind the scenes in support has been incredible. >> We see that in gaming all the time, you know it's really hard for a gaming company to necessarily predict where in the globe a game's going to be particularly hot. Games get super popular super fast if they're successful, it's really hard to predict. It's another vertical that's got a similar dynamic. >> So gaming, crypto, so you're saying that you're able to assist your customers in architecting so that the website doesn't crash. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> But at the same time, if the the business dynamic changes, they can dial down. >> Yeah. >> Right and in many ways, slow is the new down, right? And if somebody has a slow experience they're going to leave your site just as much as if it's- >> I'm out of here- >> You were down. So you know, it's really maintaining that really fast performance, that amazing customer experience. Because this is all measured, it's scientific. Like anytime there's friction in the process, you're going to lose customers. >> So obviously people are excited about your keynote, but what have they been saying? Any specific comments you can share, or questions that you got that were really interesting or? >> I'm already getting links to the apps that people are deploying. So the whole idea- >> Come on! >> All over the world. Yeah so it's already working I'm excited. >> So they were show they were showing off, "Look what I did" Really? >> Yeah on Twitter. >> That's amazing. >> I think from my standpoint, I got a question earlier, we were with a bunch of financial analysts and investors, and they said they've been talking to a lot of the customers in the halls. And just to see, you know, from the last time we were all in person, the number of our customers that are using multiple capabilities across this idea of a developer data platform, you know, certainly MongoDB's been a popular core database open source for a long time. But the new capabilities around search, analytics, mobile being adopted much more broadly to power these experiences is the most exciting thing from our side. >> So from 2019 to now, you're saying substantial uptick in adoption for these features? >> Yeah. And many of them are new. >> Time series as well, that's pretty new, so yeah. >> Yeah and you know, our philosophy of development at MongoDB is to get capabilities in the hands of customers early. Get that feedback to enrich and drive that product-market fit. And over the last three years especially, we've been transitioning from a single product kind of core, you know, non relational modern database to a data platform, a developer data platform that adds more and more capabilities to power these modern applications. And a lot of those were released during the pandemic. Certainly we talked about them in our virtual conferences and all the zoom meetings we had over the years. But to actually go talk to all these customers, this is the largest conference we've ever put on, and to get a sense of, wow all the amazing things they're doing with them, it's definitely a different feeling when we're all together. >> So that's interesting, when you have such a hot product, product-led growth which is what Mongo has been in, and you add these new features. They're coming from the developers who are saying, "Hey, we need this." >> Yip. >> Okay so you have a pretty high degree of confidence, but how do you know when you have product-market fit? I mean, is it adoption, usage, renewals? What's your metric? >> Yeah I think it's a mix of quantitative measures that you know, around conversion rates, the size of your funnel, the retention rate, NPS which obviously can be measured, but also just qualitative. You know when you're talking to a developer or a technology executive around what their needs are, and then you see how they actually apply it to solve a problem, it's that balance between the qualitative and the quantitative measurement of things. And you can just sort of, frankly you can feel it. You can see it in the numbers sure, but you can kind of feel that excitement, you can see that adoption and what it empowers people to do. And so to me, as a product leader, it's always a blend of those things. If you get too obsessed with purely the metrics, you can always over optimize something for the wrong reason. So you have to bring in that qualitative feedback to balance yourself out. >> Right. >> Guillermo, what's next? What do you not have that you want from Sahir and Mongo? >> So the natural next step for serverless computing is, is the Edge. So we have to auto-scale, we have to tolerate fares. We have to be avail. We have to be easy, but we have to be global. And right now we've been doing this by using a lot of techniques like caching and replication and things like this. But the future's about personalizing even more to each visitor depending on where they are. So if I'm in New York, I want to get the latest offers for New York on demand, just for me, and using AI to continue to personalize that experience. So giving the developer these tools in a way where it feels natural to build an application like this. It doesn't feel like, "Oh I'm going to do this year 10 if I make it, I'm going to do it since the very beginning." >> Dave: Okay interesting. So that says to me that I'm not going to make a round trip to the cloud necessarily for that experience. So I'm going to have some kind, Apple today, at the Worldwide Developer Conference announced the M2, right. I've been looking at the M1 Ultra, and I'm going wow look at that! And so- >> Sahir: You were talking about that new one backstage. >> I mean it's this amazing pace of Silicon development and they're focusing on the NPU and you look at what Tesla's doing. I mean it's just incredible. So you're going to have some new hardware architecture that emerges. Most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. You're going to have a real time inferencing at the Edge. So that's not going to do the round trip. There's going to be a data store there, I think it has to be. You're going to persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. So it's a whole new architecture- >> Sahir: Absolutely. >> That's developing. That sounds very disruptive. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> How do you think about that, and how does Mongo play there? Guillermo first. >> What I spent a lot of time thinking about is obviously the developer experience, giving the programmer a programming model that is natural, intuitive, and produces its great results. So if they have to think about data that's local because of regulatory reasons for example, how can we let the framework guide them to success? I'm just writing an application I deployed to the cloud and then everything else is figured out. >> Yeah or speed of light is another challenge. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> How can we overcome the speed of light is our next task for sure. >> Well you're working on that aren't you? You've got the best engineers on that one. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> We can solve a lot of problems, I'm not sure of that one. >> So Mongo plays in that scenario or? >> Yeah so I think, absolutely you know, we've been focused heavily on becoming the globally distributed cloud data layer. The back-end data layer that allows you to persist data to align with performance and move data where it needs to be globally or deal with data sovereignty, data nationalism that's starting to rise, but absolutely there is more data being pushed out to the Edge, to your point around processing or inference happening at the Edge. And there's going to be a globally distributed front-end layer as well, whether data and processing takes apart. And so we're focused on one, making sure the data connectivity and the layer is all connected into one unified architecture. We do that in combination with technologies that we have that do with mobility or edge distribution and synchronization of data with realm. And we do it with partnerships. We have edge partnerships with AWS and Verizon. We have partnerships with a lot of CVM players who are building out that Edge platform and making sure that MongoDB is either connected to it or just driving that synchronization back and forth. >> I call that unified experience super cloud, Robbie Belson from Verizon the cloud continuum, but that consistent experience for developers whether you're on Prim, whether you're in you know, Azure, Google, AWS, and ultimately the Edge. That's the big- >> That's where it's going. >> White space right now I'm hearing, Guillermo, right? >> I think it'll define the next generation of how software is built. And we're seeing this almost like a coalition course between some of the ideas that the Web3 developers are excited about, which is like decentralization almost to the extreme. But the Web2 also needs more decentralization, because we're seeing it with like, the data needs to be local to me, I need more privacy. I was looking at the latest encryption features in Mongo, like I think both Web2 need to incorporate more of the ideas of Web3 and vice versa to create the best possible consumer experience. Privacy matters more than ever before. Latency for conversion matters more than ever before. And regulations are changing. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> And you talked about Web3 earlier, talked about new protocols, a new distributed you know, decentralized system emerging, new hardware architectures. I really believe we really think that new economics are going to bleed back into the data center, and yeah every 15 years or so this industry gets disrupted. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> You know you ain't see nothing yet guys. >> We all talked about hardware becoming commoditized 10, 15 years ago- >> Yeah of course. >> We get the virtualization, and it's like nope not at all. It's actually a lot of invention happening. >> The lower the price the more the consumption. So guys thanks so much. Great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. >> Really appreciate it I enjoyed the conversation. >> All right and thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. Dave Vellante for theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. >> Man Offscreen: Clear. (clapping) >> All right wow. Don't get up. >> Sahir: Okay. >> Is that a Moonwatch? >> Sahir: It is a Speedmaster but it's that the-

>> Man Offscreen: Standby. Dave is coming you in 5, 4, 3, 2. >> We're back at the Big Apple, theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. Sahir Azam is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of MongoDB, and Guillermo Rauch who's the CEO of Vercel. Hot off the keynotes from this morning guys, good job. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us here. Thanks for having us. Guillermo when it comes to modern web development, you know the back-end, the cloud guys got to it kind of sewn up, >> you know- >> Guillermo: Forget about it. >> But all the action's in the front end, and that's where you are. Explain Vercel. >> Yeah so Vercel is the company that pioneers front-end development as serverless infrastructure. So we built Next.js which is the most popular React framework in the world. This is what front-end engineers choose to build innovative UI's, beautiful websites. Companies like Dior and GitHub and TikTok and Twitch, which we mentioned in the keynote, are powering their entire dot-coms or all of their new parts of their dot-coms with Next.js. And Vercel is the serverless platform where you can deploy frameworks like in Next.js and others like Svelte and Vue to create really fast experiences on the web. >> So I hear, so serverless, I hear that's the hot trend. You guys made some announcements today. I mean when you look at the, we have spending data with our friends at ETR right down the street. I mean it's just off the charts, whether it's Amazon, Google, Azure Functions, I mean it's just exploding. >> Sahir: Yeah, it's I think in many ways, it's a natural trend. You know, we talk a lot about, whether it be today's keynote or another industry talks you see around our industry that developers are constantly looking for ways to focus on innovation and the business logic that defines their application and as opposed to managing the plumbing, and management of infrastructure. And we've seen this happen over and over again across every layer of the stack. And so for us, you know MongoDB, we have a bit of, you know sort of a lens of a broad spectrum of the market. We certainly have you know, large enterprises that are modernizing existing kind of core systems, then we have developers all over the world who are building the next big best thing. And that's what led us to partner with Vercel is just the bleeding edge of developers building in a new way, in a much more efficient way. And we wanted to make sure we provide a data platform that fits naturally in the way they want to work. >> So explain to our audience the trade-offs of serverless, and I want to get into sort of how you've resolved that. And then I want to hear from Guillermo, what that means for developers. >> Sahir: Yeah in our case, we don't view it as an either or, there are certain workloads and definitely certain companies that will gravitate towards a more traditional database infrastructure where they're choosing the configuration of their cluster. They want full control over it. And that provides, you know, certain benefits around cost predictability or isolation or perceived benefits at least of those things. And customers will gravitate towards that. Now on the flip side, if you're building a new application or you want the ability to scale seamlessly and not have to worry about any of the plumbing, serverless is clearly the easier model. So over the long term, we certainly expect to see as a mix of things, more and more serverless workloads being built on our platform and just generally in the industry, which is why we leaned in so heavily on investing in Atlas serverless. But the flexibility to not be forced into a particular model, but to get the same database experience across your application and even switch between them is an important characteristic for us as we build going forward. >> And you stressed the cost efficiency, and not having to worry about, you know, starting cold. You've architected around that, and what does that mean for a developer? >> Guillermo: For a developer it means that you kind of get the best of both worlds, right? Like you get the best possible performance. Front-end developers are extremely sensitive to this. That's why us pioneering this concept, serverless front-end, has put us in a very privileged position because we have to deliver that really quick time to first buy, that really quick paint. So any of the old trade-offs of serverless are not accepted by the market. You have to be extremely fast. You have to be instant to deliver that front-end content. So what we talked about today for example, with the Vercel Edge network, we're removing all of the cost of that like first hit. That cold start doesn't really exist. And now we're seeing it all across the board, going into the back-end where Mongo has also gotten rid of it. >> Dave: How do you guys collaborate? What's the focus of integration specifically from, you know, an engineering resource standpoint? >> Yeah the main idea is, idea to global app in seconds, right? You have your idea. We give you the framework. We don't give you infrastructure primitives. We give you all the necessary tools to start your application. In practice this means you host it in a Git repo. You import it onto Vercel. You install the Mongo integration. Now your front-end and your data back-end are connected. And then your application just goes global in seconds. >> So, okay. So you've abstracted away the complexity of those primitives, is that correct? >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> Do do developers ever say, "That's awesome but I'd like to get to them every now and then." Or do you not allow that? >> Definitely. We expose all the underlying APIs, and the key thing we hear is that, especially with the push for usage-based billing models, observability is of the essence. So at any time you have to be able to query, in real time, every data point that the platform is observing. We give you performance analytics in real time to see how your front-end is performing. We give you statistics about how often you're querying your back-end and so on, and your cache hit ratios. So what I talked about today in the keynote is, it's not just about throwing more compute at the problem, but the ability to use the edge to your advantage to memoize computation and reuse it across different visits. >> When we think of mission critical historically, you know, you think about going to the ATM, right? I mean a financial transaction. But Mongo is positioning for mission critical applications across a variety of industries. Do we need to rethink what mission critical means? >> I think it's all in the eye of the beholder so to speak. If you're a new business starting up, your software and your application is your entire business. So if you have a cold start latency or God forbid something actually goes down, you don't have a business. So it's just as mission critical to that founder of a new business and new technology as it is, you know, an established enterprise that's running sort of a more, you know, day-to-day application that we may all interact with. So we treat all of those scenarios with equal fervor and importance right? And many times, it's a lot of those new experiences that the become the day-to-day experiences for us globally, and are super important. And we power all of those, whether it be an established enterprise all the way to the next big startup. >> I often talk about COVID as the forced march to digital. >> Sahir: Mm-Hmm. >> Which was obviously a little bit rushed, but if you weren't in digital business, you were out of business. And so now you're seeing people step back and say, "All right, let's be more thoughtful about our digital transformation. We've got some time, we've obviously learned some things made some mistakes." It's all about the customer experience though. And that becomes mission critical right? What are you seeing Guillermo, in terms of the patterns in digital transformation now that we're sort of exiting the isolation economy? >> One thing that comes to mind is, we're seeing that it's not always predictable how fast you're going to grow in this digital economy. So we have customers in the ecommerce space, they do a drop and they're piggybacking on serverless to give them that ability to instantly scale. And they couldn't even prepare for some of these events. We see that a lot with the Web3 space and NFT drops, where they're building in such a way that they're not sensitive to this massive fluctuations in traffic. They're taking it for granted. We've put in so much work together behind the scenes to support it. But the digital native creator just, "Oh things are scaling from one second to the next like I'm hitting like 20,000 requests per second, no problem Vercel is handling it." But the amount of infrastructural work that's gone behind the scenes in support has been incredible. >> We see that in gaming all the time, you know it's really hard for a gaming company to necessarily predict where in the globe a game's going to be particularly hot. Games get super popular super fast if they're successful, it's really hard to predict. It's another vertical that's got a similar dynamic. >> So gaming, crypto, so you're saying that you're able to assist your customers in architecting so that the website doesn't crash. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> But at the same time, if the the business dynamic changes, they can dial down. >> Yeah. >> Right and in many ways, slow is the new down, right? And if somebody has a slow experience they're going to leave your site just as much as if it's- >> I'm out of here- >> You were down. So you know, it's really maintaining that really fast performance, that amazing customer experience. Because this is all measured, it's scientific. Like anytime there's friction in the process, you're going to lose customers. >> So obviously people are excited about your keynote, but what have they been saying? Any specific comments you can share, or questions that you got that were really interesting or? >> I'm already getting links to the apps that people are deploying. So the whole idea- >> Come on! >> All over the world. Yeah so it's already working I'm excited. >> So they were show they were showing off, "Look what I did" Really? >> Yeah on Twitter. >> That's amazing. >> I think from my standpoint, I got a question earlier, we were with a bunch of financial analysts and investors, and they said they've been talking to a lot of the customers in the halls. And just to see, you know, from the last time we were all in person, the number of our customers that are using multiple capabilities across this idea of a developer data platform, you know, certainly MongoDB's been a popular core database open source for a long time. But the new capabilities around search, analytics, mobile being adopted much more broadly to power these experiences is the most exciting thing from our side. >> So from 2019 to now, you're saying substantial uptick in adoption for these features? >> Yeah. And many of them are new. >> Time series as well, that's pretty new, so yeah. >> Yeah and you know, our philosophy of development at MongoDB is to get capabilities in the hands of customers early. Get that feedback to enrich and drive that product-market fit. And over the last three years especially, we've been transitioning from a single product kind of core, you know, non relational modern database to a data platform, a developer data platform that adds more and more capabilities to power these modern applications. And a lot of those were released during the pandemic. Certainly we talked about them in our virtual conferences and all the zoom meetings we had over the years. But to actually go talk to all these customers, this is the largest conference we've ever put on, and to get a sense of, wow all the amazing things they're doing with them, it's definitely a different feeling when we're all together. >> So that's interesting, when you have such a hot product, product-led growth which is what Mongo has been in, and you add these new features. They're coming from the developers who are saying, "Hey, we need this." >> Yip. >> Okay so you have a pretty high degree of confidence, but how do you know when you have product-market fit? I mean, is it adoption, usage, renewals? What's your metric? >> Yeah I think it's a mix of quantitative measures that you know, around conversion rates, the size of your funnel, the retention rate, NPS which obviously can be measured, but also just qualitative. You know when you're talking to a developer or a technology executive around what their needs are, and then you see how they actually apply it to solve a problem, it's that balance between the qualitative and the quantitative measurement of things. And you can just sort of, frankly you can feel it. You can see it in the numbers sure, but you can kind of feel that excitement, you can see that adoption and what it empowers people to do. And so to me, as a product leader, it's always a blend of those things. If you get too obsessed with purely the metrics, you can always over optimize something for the wrong reason. So you have to bring in that qualitative feedback to balance yourself out. >> Right. >> Guillermo, what's next? What do you not have that you want from Sahir and Mongo? >> So the natural next step for serverless computing is, is the Edge. So we have to auto-scale, we have to tolerate fares. We have to be avail. We have to be easy, but we have to be global. And right now we've been doing this by using a lot of techniques like caching and replication and things like this. But the future's about personalizing even more to each visitor depending on where they are. So if I'm in New York, I want to get the latest offers for New York on demand, just for me, and using AI to continue to personalize that experience. So giving the developer these tools in a way where it feels natural to build an application like this. It doesn't feel like, "Oh I'm going to do this year 10 if I make it, I'm going to do it since the very beginning." >> Dave: Okay interesting. So that says to me that I'm not going to make a round trip to the cloud necessarily for that experience. So I'm going to have some kind, Apple today, at the Worldwide Developer Conference announced the M2, right. I've been looking at the M1 Ultra, and I'm going wow look at that! And so- >> Sahir: You were talking about that new one backstage. >> I mean it's this amazing pace of Silicon development and they're focusing on the NPU and you look at what Tesla's doing. I mean it's just incredible. So you're going to have some new hardware architecture that emerges. Most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. You're going to have a real time inferencing at the Edge. So that's not going to do the round trip. There's going to be a data store there, I think it has to be. You're going to persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. So it's a whole new architecture- >> Sahir: Absolutely. >> That's developing. That sounds very disruptive. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> How do you think about that, and how does Mongo play there? Guillermo first. >> What I spent a lot of time thinking about is obviously the developer experience, giving the programmer a programming model that is natural, intuitive, and produces its great results. So if they have to think about data that's local because of regulatory reasons for example, how can we let the framework guide them to success? I'm just writing an application I deployed to the cloud and then everything else is figured out. >> Yeah or speed of light is another challenge. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> How can we overcome the speed of light is our next task for sure. >> Well you're working on that aren't you? You've got the best engineers on that one. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> We can solve a lot of problems, I'm not sure of that one. >> So Mongo plays in that scenario or? >> Yeah so I think, absolutely you know, we've been focused heavily on becoming the globally distributed cloud data layer. The back-end data layer that allows you to persist data to align with performance and move data where it needs to be globally or deal with data sovereignty, data nationalism that's starting to rise, but absolutely there is more data being pushed out to the Edge, to your point around processing or inference happening at the Edge. And there's going to be a globally distributed front-end layer as well, whether data and processing takes apart. And so we're focused on one, making sure the data connectivity and the layer is all connected into one unified architecture. We do that in combination with technologies that we have that do with mobility or edge distribution and synchronization of data with realm. And we do it with partnerships. We have edge partnerships with AWS and Verizon. We have partnerships with a lot of CVM players who are building out that Edge platform and making sure that MongoDB is either connected to it or just driving that synchronization back and forth. >> I call that unified experience super cloud, Robbie Belson from Verizon the cloud continuum, but that consistent experience for developers whether you're on Prim, whether you're in you know, Azure, Google, AWS, and ultimately the Edge. That's the big- >> That's where it's going. >> White space right now I'm hearing, Guillermo, right? >> I think it'll define the next generation of how software is built. And we're seeing this almost like a coalition course between some of the ideas that the Web3 developers are excited about, which is like decentralization almost to the extreme. But the Web2 also needs more decentralization, because we're seeing it with like, the data needs to be local to me, I need more privacy. I was looking at the latest encryption features in Mongo, like I think both Web2 need to incorporate more of the ideas of Web3 and vice versa to create the best possible consumer experience. Privacy matters more than ever before. Latency for conversion matters more than ever before. And regulations are changing. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> And you talked about Web3 earlier, talked about new protocols, a new distributed you know, decentralized system emerging, new hardware architectures. I really believe we really think that new economics are going to bleed back into the data center, and yeah every 15 years or so this industry gets disrupted. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> You know you ain't see nothing yet guys. >> We all talked about hardware becoming commoditized 10, 15 years ago- >> Yeah of course. >> We get the virtualization, and it's like nope not at all. It's actually a lot of invention happening. >> The lower the price the more the consumption. So guys thanks so much. Great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. >> Really appreciate it I enjoyed the conversation. >> All right and thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. Dave Vellante for theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. >> Man Offscreen: Clear. (clapping) >> All right wow. Don't get up. >> Sahir: Okay. >> Is that a Moonwatch? >> Sahir: It is a Speedmaster but it's that the-