IT departments today are being challenged to adopt new and far more strategic roles within the organizations they serve. As more businesses turn to technology as a competitive differentiator, IT is being challenged to step away from its traditional focus on running infrastructure and to step up as a strategic business function—delivering software and services that support innovation and create compelling customer experiences.
Modern, cloud-native applications are critical to this transformation. The cloud allows IT organizations to retire legacy applications and infrastructure, and to deliver software that is far more resilient and scalable—without sacrificing usability and performance.
The legacy database: a weak link in the cloud-native chain
As businesses migrate to managed infrastructure and cloud-native apps, on-prem legacy database systems have emerged as a serious barrier to scalability and performance. As a result, more businesses are turning to new database options such as MongoDB Atlas that are designed to meet the demands of modern, cloud-native environments.Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Legacy databases were designed for environments where data came in small, tidy packages and where scalability wasn’t a major requirement. That makes these systems a poor fit for cloud-native applications that are built to scale and that drive massive amounts of data.
JSON-based document databases like MongoDB, on the other hand, are very well-suited for modern application development methods: teams can store data in a format not unlike the objects in their code, allowing them to work quickly and efficiently. And as a managed database-as-a-service solution, MongoDB Atlas gives IT organizations an alternative to the cost and complexity of an on-premises, legacy system.
AutoTrader UK builds a future on MongoDB Atlas
AutoTrader UK is a great example of an IT organization that’s using MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud to modernize its legacy databases in favor of a fully managed, database-as-a-service platform. AutoTrader UK relied heavily on Oracle and SQL Server but began using MongoDB in its own data centers so that its development teams could move faster. After migrating to MongoDB Atlas, the company retained all of the advantages of its self-managed MongoDB environment, but shed the operational and infrastructure complexity. This was a critical move for a company built almost entirely on the value of its business data, and where scalability and resource management posed especially pressing challenges.To release new features faster, AutoTrader UK launched multiple initiatives to improve team efficiency and agility, including migrating entirely to the cloud and moving off legacy databases. Their team already had experience with and enjoyed using various Google Cloud services like Dataflow and BigQuery, which helped fuel their decision to migrate entirely to Google Cloud - replacing their Oracle database with Cloud SQL - and MongoDB Atlas. As Russell Warman, Head of Infrastructure at AutoTrader put it: “From a business perspective, migrating to Google Cloud Platform means we can get ideas up and running quickly, enabling us to build brilliant new products, helping us to continue to lead in this space.”
The company’s developers now roll out new products far more quickly and with greater confidence, and the company has since made big strides in decommissioning its on-premises data center. This brought IT’s legacy management burden under control, along with infrastructure and related costs.
Just as important, the move to MongoDB Atlas and Cloud SQL set the stage for AutoTrader UK to compete and win with software. The company’s development team pushed over 36,000 releases live in a year including more than 450 releases in a single day. With nearly 270 apps deployed in the public cloud today, AutoTrader UK maintains a 99.79% release success rate and 99.99% availability for its core search functionality.
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