MongoDB

Life’s been good to me so far 🎶

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Every time I get on a plane I have thoughts about mortality and eternity. This post shares part of its title with a song by Joe Walsh, and the title sums up how I’m feeling about things as we all go hurtling toward 2026 together.

Except for a two-year happy hiatus in Rifle, Colorado, and summer escapes to Newfound Lake, New Hampshire, much of my childhood through sixth grade was a nightmare. Over the years, though, I’ve had more fun than pretty much any 3-to-5 people I know and some minor rock bands.

Yearbook hallway scene at Grissom High School, Huntsville, Alabama; thank you, Lynn

I’ve anticipated or survived four acquisition-to-downsizings and a chapter 11 filing by my employers to build what so far is an amazing, rewarding career, on track for a decent retirement if I ever do retire someday. All while having had the honor and good fortune to help our children and their loving spouses, in what may be the worst home ownership era for first-time buyers in modern history, buy their first homes.

I revel in the love of my beautiful family, now including a grandson and a grandpup…and our other pups who have left this world…whom collectively are the greatest people and creatures I have ever known. Only our kids post photos of their little loved ones online, so I’m not posting them here, but trust me, they’re beyond adorable.

Glorious Family Disney Trip: Michelle – Chris – Heather – Courtney – Joanne – me / This post’s featured image is from a maybe-even-more-glorious Family Royal Caribbean Cruise


I love what I do today at Cockroach Labs and have done at MongoDB, Gartner, Stratecast, and elsewhere; in our home and on our property; at the gym, in parks, and on walking trails; and at some great winetasting and craft beer venues.


I value dear friends and just met two of them, Doug and Ben, for a festive dinner at Carraba’s, Parkway Place, Huntsville. Shoutout to our son (-in-law, but to us he’s our son) Chris for getting me a killer deal at a really nice Marriott property for that trip.

We have some wonderful neighbors here in roughly the center of the US who have more than made up for the nightmare neighbors we endured in years past on one of the coasts.

I love the world-class sounds I hear in my Edifier headphones and Apple AirPods, from gorgeous, soaring movie soundtracks to high-speed, piledriving,  intense-but-for- the-most-part-not-openly-evil hard rock and metal. Many you’ve heard of and many more you probably haven’t.


As you may see in the image above, I never fall in line with ‘selected top lists’ of anything, starting with music. Can’t buy all the way into the issues and platform of any one political party, so I’m a Registered Independent.

I’ve never smoked, vaped, or used chewing tobacco in my life—with two glaring exceptions. Tried one cigarette on a Fish-and-Game Club overnight school trip in I think 5th grade, and hated it. One Saturday during high school, a bunch of us were playing a pickup game of baseball and one of the guys gave me a big chunk of chewing tobacco to try, “because big leaguers do the chew.” Five minutes later I made a diving circus catch of a long fly ball—and swallowed the whole chaw. Laid on the field for a half-hour before I felt like I could move again.

Hardest drug I’ve ever used is pot, which I never paid for but always seemed to happen upon for free from generous friends at parties in high school and my first year of college at Auburn University. That is, until 3x with different friends in far-flung locations, my respiratory system started shutting down after a few tokes. No more pot for me! Years earlier I had found myself sitting in a car in a darkened parking lot after closing time with some guys at my first job at a pizza place in Huntsville. Some of them were doing tabs of acid (yep, LSD), and one piped up: “It’s your first time, Jeff, so you should probably just do half a tab.” Did NO tabs 😊 and kept drinking my beer.

After decades of quiet-quitting meat by not eating lamb or veal because they’re baby animals, in 2016 Joanne and I, at Heather’s suggestion, went full Vegan. Yet, while Field Roast and Follow-Your-Heart produce delicious vegan cheeses, Violife makes a true-to-life Parmesan block for grating over pasta, and Hellman’s vegan mayo tastes better to us than the eggy original, no one has nailed the art of vegan cheese that works well on pizza. Good pizza is essential eating, and I love omelets and egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwiches. So a few years later we dialed it back to Vegetarian 🌱 and take B12 daily to supplement the meat we’re not eating.

I own arguably the most bada** shirt you’ll find in fine vegetarianwear, featuring the Slayer logotype

Do I love making cocktails? SEE: image below.

My family got me this shirt featuring the logotype from The Godfather

So, back to mortality and eternity. While I guess I might like to live forever, my life has already been blessed-to-spectacular. My stock phrase about whenever my time on Earth comes to an end: “It’ll save me a lot of work next month.” And if the loving animals who have been a part of our lives somehow do not get into Heaven with my family, but are herded away to Pet Heaven, I plan to arrange a Park Hopper Pass with God. That way I can go from where I’m pretty sure I’ll be—a slice of cosmic real estate I call Permanent Purgatory—and travel between People Heaven and Pet Heaven, like on weekends, or on Mondays when park traffic is lighter, so I can visit those I love most for eternity.

You want more, discerning readers, on Permanent Purgatory? Good call. To me, New York Times bestselling author Dave Barry is the greatest humor writer who has ever lived. Dave’s in a band with other writers and authors, the Rock Bottom Remainders, and he’s always calling out phrases that might be good band names. So I like to think Dave might say: “Permanent Purgatory would also be a good name for a band.”

Dave posing with one of the myriad of masterpieces he has authored: Best. State. Ever, about his home base of Florida

I’ll now bring this post to a close with some shameless plugs for Dave (which, to be clear, he did not ask for and knows nothing about):

Dave Barry on Substack

DaveBarry.com, which offers many of Dave’s legendary columns and Holiday Gift Guides at The Miami Herald and beyond

Your data needs to keep up with the state of play today. Event-driven architecture will get you up to speed

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The Pop-Up Playground Party at AWS re:Invent 2019, sponsored by MongoDB and Confluent, was an exclusive, interactive event featuring immersive art, light, gaming, and play activations with an open bar, DJs, and more, at the Industrial Las Vegas.

Attendees got to create unforgettable memories (or at least killer Instagram photos) at the glowing ball pit, DIY graffiti walls, retro arcade games, and other immersive activities, such as getting a temporary tattoo in a sports car. Meanwhile, the Hood Internet and Vegas’s hottest DJs kept the soundtrack fresh all night long!

In a word, the Pop-Up Playground was: fun.

Something that is way less fun: being one of the many companies that increasingly find it impossible to keep up with the pace of business because their data platforms can’t keep up. Under those circumstances life is anything but a party, in fact, the opposite of a party. 

That’s why MongoDB and Confluent teamed up, not just to throw the best party at re:Invent but to help companies run their businesses in real time. 

An effective approach to real time could not come at a better time, because many companies are still trying to meet their data needs in ways that don’t match modern business reality. Some are mired in 40-year-old relational database technology. Others think updating to a NoSQL database is positioning them for the future. They soon learn that while getting data in may be easy enough, getting insights out is a whole different story, and what they are actually positioned for now are niche applications, not an effective new data strategy.

The results of pursuing the wrong data strategy can be harmful or fatal. CNBC Markets found that the average lifespan of S&P 500 companies has fallen from nearly 60 years in the 1950s to less than 20 years today. Innosight modeled the rate of attrition from the S&P 500 and predicted that over the next 10 years, half the companies will be replaced: drop out, go out of business, or be acquired, as digital transformation lowers barriers to entry for new players and helps drive out incumbents trapped in legacy infrastructures and processes.

The traditional request-driven data architecture that still exists at many companies helps keep them trapped in legacy limitations. It requires users and applications to make requests and wait until the requested information becomes available. Waiting for data kills opportunity and agility.

By contrast, event-driven architecture, which I posted about on jeffcotrupe.com,  proactively makes a stream of data from source systems (producers) available in real time. Consuming applications and services (consumers) subscribe to topics of interest and consume data at their own pace. Capturing and acting on events in real time enables systems to react automatically and immediately to events. This helps a company rapidly position itself to outflank competitors. Detecting operational errors lets it take immediate corrective action. These benefits translate into not only operational excellence and cost savings but also enhanced customer experience as the company optimizes customer-facing processes. More broadly, an event-driven architecture helps the organization improve business agility.

The key driver today in making the need for real-time data an organizational imperative is the emergence of microservices. Microservices architecture breaks up monolithic applications into small, discrete services or functions. It creates self-sufficient sprint teams empowered to bring new capabilities online independently of each other, then over time evolve and upgrade their microservice without impacting adjacent microservices. That is the essence of agility.

As beneficial as microservices can be, though, they require the ability to work with large volumes of data that change frequently, which is a challenge many existing systems cannot meet. Trying to implement microservices in a legacy relational database incurs the pain and friction of having to define a schema in the database and re-implement that same schema again to effect object-relational mapping (ORM) at the application layer. Then your development team has to repeat the process, first for each microservice and then every change to the data model as application functionality evolves.

With MongoDB, data modeling for microservices is easy, which is a big reason MongoDB is at the core of many event-driven systems today. MongoDB’s flexible document model gives you the best way to work with data, lets you intelligently place data where you need it (and when, as in immediately), and gives you the freedom to run anywhere. MongoDB helps you move at the speed your users demand. It gives you the power to launch new digital initiatives and bring modernized applications to market faster, running reliably and securely at scale, unlocking insights and intelligence ahead of your competitors.

 

By starting with the core MongoDB data platform and binding in complementary technologies, MongoDB provides the data persistence heart of an event-driven architecture. MongoDB and Confluent work together to enable you to readily build microservices and event-driven architectures to become an agile organization.

Confluent Platform, including Apache® Kafka® and Kafka Connect, is designed as an event messaging queue for massive streams of data that sequentially writes events into commit logs, allowing real-time data movement between your services and data sources. The MongoDB Connector for Apache® Kafka® — developed and supported by MongoDB engineers, and verified by Confluent as a first-class component of Confluent Platform — simplifies building robust, reactive pipelines to move events between systems. You can use MongoDB as a sink (consumer) to ingest events from Kafka topics directly into MongoDB collections, exposing the data to your services for efficient querying, enrichment, and analytics, as well as for long-term storage. You can also use MongoDB as a source (producer) for Kafka topics; in this mode, data is captured via Change Streams within the MongoDB cluster and published straight into Kafka topics. These capabilities enable consuming apps to react to data changes in real time.

MongoDB-powered event-driven architectures are at work in a range of user cases including IoT and other time series applications; financial services; AI; predictive maintenance, primarily in manufacturing but also in other verticals; Web activity tracking and log aggregation; and as an operational data layer (ODL) integrating and organizing siloed enterprise data to make it available to all users and consuming apps. Customers who have deployed event-driven architecture powered by MongoDB include Ticketek, EG, ao.com, Man AHL, and comparethemarket.com. 

The figure below shows MongoDB and Confluent working together in an event-driven architecture supporting a microservices-based e-commerce application.

In this scenario, fuel costs to ship some items have just gone up, which could impact pricing. This produces events about the cost increase and places them into Apache Kafka. The Pricing microservice consumes the event, analyzes it against existing data, and produces events conveying the new pricing. MongoDB Atlas captures this data and, through the MongoDB Connector for Apache Kafka, publishes it into Kafka topics, which makes the data available to all consumers. Microservices directly impacted by pricing changes, such as those that manage inventory, marketing, promotions & coupons, point of sale (POS), and the e-commerce provider’s order management system (OMS), consume the price change events and update their individual databases accordingly. MongoDB Atlas aggregates and persists data from all microservices, enriches event streams with data from other sources, including historical data, and provides a central repository. This enables applications and users to benefit from all data across all microservices and provides a unified view of state across the e-commerce provider’s enterprise.

To learn more, download our white paper, How MongoDB Enables Real-Time Data with Event-Driven Architecture, and visit our Real-Time Analytics page.

I’m now at MongoDB!

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I am now a proud member of the Product Marketing team at MongoDB: the first database company to go public in more than two decades (NASDAQ: $MDB), its business growing at ~50% YoY, with the technology and vision to take on the multibillion-dollar incumbents as it disrupts and reshapes an entire industry. As an analyst I had forecast a total market opportunity of $67.89 billion in big data and analytics by 2019, growing to nearly $111 billion by 2022. I am excited to be at a truly global company capturing a sizable and growing share of that opportunity!

My role is Senior Solutions Marketing Manager, a core part of an energetic and globally distributed team reporting to the Senior Director, Products and Solutions, based in the UK. I am responsible for driving solutions marketing and GTM content positioning the UVP of our product/services portfolio to a senior audience.

If you are not already using MongoDB, let’s talk about what it can do for you and your organization. If you are, I’d like to hear how you are doing. You can find me at any contact point on the Connections page and I’ll be in touch soon.