Einstein famously said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’. We need speed to be agile in a volatile world , This can include accelerating time to market, rapidly prototyping and iterating, and releasing innovations in their minimum viable state, rather than waiting to perfect them.
Modern media is defined by speed. Stories break. Content goes viral. And readers flock to whatever site gets them the most interesting, relevant content faster than anyone else. Today, all the action and ad dollars are online.
So to attract and keep eyeballs , publishers have to move fast. They need to quickly post articles from writers around the world. And they also need to get the hottest, most share-worthy content in front of readers as quickly as possible.
Challenges with Forbes..
Forbes, American business magazine owned by Forbes, Inc. Published biweekly, it features original articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. Forbes also reports on related subjects such as technology, communications, science, and law. Headquarters are in New York City.
A leading source of business news since 1917, Forbes has always produced quality content. What they lacked was speed. They couldn’t keep up with the quickening pace of journalism with old, closed systems. Outages were common. Changes to the architecture were challenging and costly.
Modern applications demand radically new capabilities from databases and data management technologies. Even in the last five years, applications have put traditional databases through their paces — and found them wanting.
This is because modern applications are inherently different. They need to satisfy the very high demands of customers in a hybrid cloud and multicloud age. They need to function in real time, always be on, and be distributed and scalable. They require new functions such as graph. And they must be able to serve up contextual data that relational databases are not designed to provide.
As enterprises grapple with these new realities, they face four key unanticipated challenges that need to be solved to move forward fast enough to keep pace with customer expectations.
Brief Introduction to MongoDB
- MongoDB stores data in flexible, JSON-like documents, meaning fields can vary from document to document and data structure can be changed over time
- MongoDB is a distributed database at its core, so high availability, horizontal scaling, and geographic distribution are built in and easy to use
- MongoDB is a NoSQL database written in C++ language. Some of its drivers use the C programming language as the base. MongoDB is a document oriented database where it stores data in collections instead of tables.
Steps taken to solve the challenges..
Forbes made a bold move. They decided to overhaul their entire platform and rebuild their content management system (CMS) on MongoDB. Now it’s incredibly fast, open to contributors globally and easy to change without going offline. All at a fraction of the time and cost of their old approach.
Forbes first built a custom CMS on MongoDB in just two months. Then they launched a brand new mobile site in less than one month.
With just one full-time and one part-time engineer, the mobile development team was tiny. But the results were huge. Overnight, mobile traffic jumped from 5% to 15% of Forbes.com total traffic, and quickly ramped to 50%.
MongoDB aggregates real-time data, including over one million articles and hundreds of thousands of comments, and delivers immediate insight into how readers are responding to content. MongoDB also simplifies the capture and analysis of Forbes’ clickstream data: what people are looking at, what parts of the page they’re viewing, and most importantly, what they’re sharing.
When an article starts to go viral, Forbes can analyze social sharing as it happens and fuel the momentum by putting the right content in front of readers within seconds.
Benefits
When an article starts to go viral, Forbes can analyze social sharing as it happens and fuel the momentum by putting the right content in front of readers within seconds.
Now , 1000 writers and bloggers can submit articles globally To open up their online platforms to this global network of content creators and marketers, Forbes needed to fundamentally change how content flowed through their editorial workflows. MongoDB allows Forbes contributors to publish high-value articles in minutes rather than hours and days.
The dynamic, real-time CMS platform is easy for writers to use. On-boarding is fast and flexible. And now the best writers, from anywhere in the world can quickly publish content. MongoDB’s JSON document model and rich query language make it easy for Forbes to store and search different content types with different attributes in a single place — such as article text, social media comments, and third-party tweets about related topics — without normalizing the attributes.
As Forbes’ readership grows, the MongoDB-powered CMS will easily grow with them. Scaling is built into the database — it’s automatic and transparent.
Conclusion
Existing resources are the best resources. Hiring DBAs or developers with special skill sets fell outside of Forbes’ limited engineering budget. Fortunately, their Java developers got up to speed quickly on MongoDB — a valuable time and cost savings.
Support is now centralized, with a much smaller team of dedicated engineers to maintain the system, search index and APIs. The result is fewer mistakes and more available resources.
Forbes continues to innovate with new publishing models. And MongoDB be there to help them quickly pivot to meet evolving strategies — to drive viewership, advertising and the business.
MongoDB has the fastest growing database ecosystem in the world..
MongoDB gives you is the ability to concentrate on your business, create the applications. Everything else is taken care of.
— Steven Bond , Group director of Forbes.com Software Development Team