MongoDB at Work: Converser

How Converser used MongoDB, and more importantly, where we made mistakes.

Talk given at Mongo Days, Munich, in November 2014

Transcript

1. MongoDB at Work: Oisín Hurley, CTO oisin@converser.io @oisin
2. Smarter marketing for mobile apps converser • A Mobile Marketing Channel for your apps — interactive messaging, segmentation and analysis
3. Smarter marketing for mobile apps • Media-rich and interesting interactive messaging • Designed to help app users make quick decisions and gather data • Allows the conversation to be structured to directly contribute to your marketing strategy
4. Smarter marketing for mobile apps • Mobile SDKs for iOS and Android • Tools to design your own conversations and deliver them to your mobile users • Straightforward analysis of app interactions and data export
5. Smarter marketing for mobile apps our customers • marketing teams seeking tools to make mobile a primary channel for access to their users • cross-verticals — customers in publishing, banking, semi-states, utilities, marketing companies, media
6. Smarter marketing for mobile apps choosing mongo • challenge: make a business that can start fast and deliver product quickly • founder experience: strong development and product construction skills • task: what storage technology to choose, given so many choices
7. Smarter marketing for mobile apps constraint: flexible data • learning while doing, and shipping while product still very much in flux • data models not optimised for unknown typical interactions — and changing typical interactions • user data variable - depends very much on application • faster to react to business changes
8. Smarter marketing for mobile apps constraint: support • The time/money balance — how much time do we spend to be experts, is there help? • An option on hosting important — agency that look after upgrades, downtime, setting up replication, etc. • An option on knowledge support — easily accessible experienced organisations • A lot of freely available information, solid language bindings
9. Smarter marketing for mobile apps Architecture principle: minimum number of moving parts, no introduction of things without good cause Actors Scheduling Messaging Mongo Redis App Servers Mobile Servers
10. Smarter marketing for mobile apps Mobile API Servers
11. Smarter marketing for mobile apps Conversation Creator
12. Smarter marketing for mobile apps the basics • maintain a subscriber list for all of the apps we represent (about 500 apps, 4.5m subscribers) • maintain an inbox for each subscriber — drop messages in there for users • gather data/events from mobile devices and track • analyse interactions and present as report • respond to automation request from external systems
13. Smarter marketing for mobile apps customers “No product plan survives first contact with the customer”
14. Smarter marketing for mobile apps data and privacy • Privacy and data location • private infrastructures for banks and semi-states • EU/US zone residency for data, with no connection between • Operational ease offered by MongoDB is helpful
15. Smarter marketing for mobile apps usage
16. Smarter marketing for mobile apps mistakes • “That collection will only get to about 20k documents when we have a thousand active customers” • “Those indexes should be fine now” • “I used an array for that” • “This changes depending on message status, yes it’s an index” • “Seriously, you can do anything with map-reduce”
17. Smarter marketing for mobile apps slow queries
18. Smarter marketing for mobile apps arrays: inbox collection
19. Smarter marketing for mobile apps locking
20. Smarter marketing for mobile apps page faults
21. Smarter marketing for mobile apps indexes
22. Smarter marketing for mobile apps arrays: alternative • read time tax about 10% • writes to inboxes 8x faster
23. Smarter marketing for mobile apps map reduce etc, etc
24. Smarter marketing for mobile apps successes • Straightforward for full time dev, part time ops tiny team • Performs well once we fixed our mistakes • High quality support • Tooling is getting really good
25. Smarter marketing for mobile apps new relic
26. Smarter marketing for mobile apps mms
27. Smarter marketing for mobile apps future tense • Cloud-managed MongoDB • Per document locking in 2.8 • Sticking with MongoDB as a key part of our infrastructure
28. Smarter marketing for mobile apps rules of thumb • keep an eye on slow queries always • indexes, choose them wisely and review • do not index fields that will change • arrays — only if they are fixed size, and allocate up front • prefer queries/aggregation to map/reduce • test collections to 50x the size you expect them to be