MongoDB: Scaling Citygrid's Places Platform

Citygrid provides a Places API to search and serve enhanced content for over 19 million local businesses. The “Places that pay” ad platform delivers ads for over 1 million local merchants. Places API 1.0 was built on relational database technology, and was unable to serve content in reasonable time at scale. After switching to MongoDB as our NoSQL solution, our current mongoDB configuration is master/slave on Amazon EC2, and can handle well over 1000 QPS at 2-3ms per call. This talk will explain the reasons we chose MongoDB as our NoSQL solution, including its built in replication, sharding, and schema-less design. We will also explain how MongoDB's schema-less design allows our Hadoop based data processing pipeline to inject content while remaining decoupled from changes to the front end serving APIs.