Chapter 5. Conclusion

Thanks for sticking with me through these pages. I’ve endeavored to not only inform and instruct, but also to give you insight into the future of software development. I first encountered MongoDB in the spring of 2010. I was the new head of engineering at OpenSky, a social ecommerce company in New York City. Their existing infrastructure was crippled by the weight of their growth, and it was clear that a better solution was needed. As we began to plan out a restructure of the application, we put all possibilities on the table. Initially, we decided to build OpenSky using PHP (with the Symfony2 framework) and MySQL. At the time, I felt that none of the NoSQL solutions were ready for production use, but one technology in particular piqued my interest and I decided we would use it to power an auxiliary component to the application. We first used MongoDB for logging. Within a couple of weeks of using it, I had a huge epiphany. I was amazed by the potential it brought. It had the potential to radically alter the way we built software, not just at OpenSky, but for the industry as a whole. I saw MongoDB as that once-in-a-decade (or two) technology that is so disruptive that it changes everything. We very quickly threw away all that we were doing with MySQL and switched over completely to MongoDB for our entire application. Our product launched ahead of an aggressive schedule and never once struggled to keep up with the explosive growth OpenSky experienced. I can ...

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