Swisscom info and facts

Swisscom launches DACH Region’s First MongoDB Enterprise-as-a-Cloud-Service

Swisscom today announced that it is launching a MongoDB Enterprise-as-a-Cloud Service for customers in Switzerland, Germany and Austria (DACH). Working in partnership with MongoDB, the world’s most popular non-relational database, Swisscom Application Cloud will empower developers to concentrate on coding, leaving management of the underlying operating systems, middleware, and databases to Swisscom.

By Armin Schädeli

31 May 2016

Hosted and managed in Swisscom’s Swiss data centers, the new service is fully containerised and will allow for rapid creation of micro services to support agile development. Two key trends that are helping organisations bring new services to market faster. Along with that ease of development, users will also get access to the value-added features of MongoDB Enterprise. This includes advanced security protection with encryption, auditing and centralized authentication; coupled with the fine grained monitoring and consistent, point in time backups available with OpsManager(opens in new tab).

Scaling easily and with agility

In the eyes of developers, one of the main advantages of MongoDB is the underlying document data model that fits better with the modern programming languages than relational databases. MongoDB documents are more closely aligned to the structure of objects in the programming language. Through its data model, inbuilt replication and sharding, MongoDB allows developers to build apps faster, run them with higher up-time and scale further than any other database. Marco Hochstrasser, Head of Cloud Platform Development, says: “MongoDB Enterprise harmonises perfectly with our existing Cloud Foundry-certified Application Cloud. We want to be one step ahead technologically with our Platform as a Service. As the most popular non-relational database, MongoDB was simply a must, and the most widely demanded database by our customers.”

In contrast to relational databases, MongoDB is based on a document data model with a dynamic schema which can easily be modified. Each document can vary in structure, making it ideal for modern web, mobile, social and internet of things applications that are handling data in multiple, rapidly changing data structures. Instead of normalizing data across multiple independent tables, related data is stored together in rich document structures. This delivers high performance as the database only needs to retrieve a single document, rather than perform costly JOIN operations, and allows the database to be more easily scaled and replicated across distributed clusters on nodes. The result for developers is a faster application development with greater performance, scalability and uptime.

Early adopters

Swisscom has been working closely with MongoDB for several years. Swisscom TV 2.0, Swisscom’s TV service from the cloud with replay function, has been using MongoDB to store metadata for TV and video on demand since 2013. Swisscom is the first partner to offer MongoDB Enterprise as a service for organizations based in the DACH region.

Joe Morrissey, Vice President EMEA, MongoDB, says: “Swisscom was as an early adopter of MongoDB and we are proud to have partnered together for many years. Swisscom has demonstrated, time and again, how valuable it can be to empower developers with the best technology. Now organisations throughout the DACH region can take advantage of Swisscom’s deep knowledge and enterprise expertise, combined with the transformational power of MongoDB Enterprise.”

About the Swisscom Application Cloud

Developers use the Cloud Foundry-certified PaaS environment in Switzerland, the US and Europe. Access is via self-service on the Swisscom Developer Portal: https://developer.swisscom.com/. They all benefit from services such as Docker/Diego, ELK, MongoDB, MariaDB, RabbitMQ, Object Storage and Redis-as-a-Service. Two container versions are available: LXC/Garden and Docker/runC. The platform supports the most popular programming languages, from Java PHP, ruby, go, python and NodeJS through to .NET.