MongoDB's Dev Ittycheria on how the cloud is expanding developers' influence

CLOUD

The cloud is evolving with more horsepower, higher-level services and industry-specific capabilities. It’s an evolution that’s been termed the “supercloud” and it’s one that the database firm MongoDB Inc. has eagerly taken advantage of to boost its standing with its hardcore developer following.

Speaking to theCUBE industry analyst and host John Furrier during an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio, ahead of AWS re:Invent, MongoDB Chief Executive Dev Ittycheria said developers are choosing to build on MongoDB because it’s the fastest way for them to innovate.

“We have a bunch of companies building machine learning applications on top of MongoDB, such as Rent the Runway, Bosch and Mount Sinai Health System,” Ittycheria said. “The reason they’re doing that is they get the benefits of being able to build and work with data faster than any other platform, and it’s highly scalable and performant in a way that no other platform offers. They can run their workloads both locally in one availability zone or they could be anywhere in the world, over 100 different regions across multiple clouds.”

Developer speed is a proxy for innovation

The supercloud is transforming the role of developers. With its the ease of use, the self-service functionality and other developer-friendly tools, they’re becoming more productive and more integral to the digital transformation of businesses today.

Ittycheria said this is happening because developer productivity is really just a proxy for innovation. The faster developers can move, the faster they can push out new code, he said. And it’s code that powers digital transformation. “The faster they can iterate and build new solutions, or add more capabilities on existing applications, the faster you can innovate to seize new opportunities or respond to new threats in your business,” he said.

As a result, developers are no longer just some “side hustle” whom C-suite executives think about once in a while. Rather, they’re becoming core to the business.

“Developers have amassed an enormous amount of power and influence,” Ittycheria said. “Their engineering teams are front and center in terms of how they think about building capabilities and building their business. “Every company is becoming a software company, because it all starts with software. Software enables, defines or creates almost every company’s value proposition.”

MongoDB as supercloud

Although Ittycheria said AWS has clearly been customer-obsessed and innovative in providing what some have described as a distinct tool for each job, he think most customers now want a simpler approach. “What we have found from talking to our customers is that in some ways, the onus is on the customer to figure out which building block to use to be able to stitch together the applications and solutions they want to build,” he said. “What we have done is taken an opinionated point of view and said, ‘We will enable you to do that using one data platform.’”

AWS today offers about a dozen different types of databases, Ittycheria noted. “Based on our conversations with customers, we don’t think that having a tool for every job makes sense because over time, the tax and cost of learning, managing and supporting those different tools doesn’t make a lot of sense or just becomes cost-prohibitive,” he said.

Instead, he thinks “one data platform, one elegant user experience, one way to address the broadest set of use cases is a better way. But clearly customers have a choice. They can use AWS’ primitives, and the second layer of services as you described, or they can use us. Fortunately, we’ve seen a lot of customers come to us with our approach.”

Speed vs. cost

Ittycheria also thinks the world of cloud computing is moving from a focus on speed to a focus on cost optimization. “People still value speed, but they want to do it at some sort of predictable cost model,” he explained. “That’s where we think having one platform, by definition, enables vendor consolidation in way for people to cut costs so that they can still move fast, but they don’t have to incur the tax of using a whole bunch of different point tools. So we’re well positioned.

Here’s the complete interview:

Photo: MongoDB