Ulta Beauty Solves Seasonal Shopping

Steve Jurczak
June 15, 2023

The holiday season can feel like a whirlwind to retailers. Between keeping up with sudden shifts in shopper preferences, supply chain nuances, and a massive increase in demand, the hardest part can be ensuring great customer experiences, both in store and online. This year, retailers have a unique challenge ahead, as those on Google Cloud have experienced more online traffic in the first half of 2022 than in all of 2019. Retailers will need to get an early start to the 2023 shopping season since 50% of consumers plan to get a jump on their holiday shopping activity before the traditional start on Black Friday. Luckily, modern advancements in automation and infrastructure can help retailers survive seasonal spikes and stay innovative year-round.

A platform for innovation

Ulta Beauty's system overhaul proved to be a success when they implemented Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and enabled the development of cloud-native applications. Ulta Beauty was able to take advantage of the new strategic change to swiftly fix bugs, test new offerings, and provide customers with far better experiences. Thanks to this transformation and using GKE, their developers are now able to launch new products and services faster, and create great customer interactions faster. Now Ulta Beauty's guests have dynamic and personal connections with beauty and wellness, with their preferences taken into account. Despite this, the company had to overcome some difficulties. As Sethu Madhav Vure, IT Architect, Ulta Beauty, explains, "Microservices are not a silver bullet. For us, the struggle was breaking up a monolithic environment into multiple applications while keeping existing services functional and preparing for the future."

Ulta Beauty sought to simplify and scale through a domain-driven design approach. Identifying and grouping similarly structured operations enabled them to create a modern architecture. To match their needs for dynamic scaling, MongoDB Atlas was selected and leveraged with Google Cloud integrations, resulting in a quick proof of concept. Thanks to comprehensive resource allocation, Vure remarked, "The free tier of MongoDB Atlas allowed us to prove the value of the technology before we invested in it."

The innovative partnership between MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud has enabled Ulta Beauty to maximize efficiency and take a rapid, iterative approach to their newest projects. It allows them to better manage their expansive data, and to deploy and scale offerings quickly and successfully, as seen in their recent unplanned traffic surge that took them less than an hour to manage. Equipped with the dynamic scalability of GKE and the on-demand functionality of MongoDB Atlas, Ulta Beauty can face any challenge with confidence.

Seasonal prep

Ulta Beauty has drastically improved its technical infrastructure to meet the demands of the holiday season. With just 20 GKE pods, the company is now able to scale up to 2,400 transactions per second! Partnering with Google Cloud, Ulta Beauty leveraged event-based integrations and Cloud Pub/Sub middleware on top of MongoDB Atlas integrations, resulting in an efficient process that maximizes the power of their platform.

By optimizing their technology partner stack, Ulta Beauty was able to make a dramatic shift in their IT culture, allowing them to trial new solutions faster and with the full support of leadership. The result? They were able to handle increased traffic during the holiday shopping season with ease, delivering the customer service they promised, free from the worry of outages. As Vure puts it, "We are now better prepared for a stress-free holiday season, enabling us to focus on creating even more great service for our customers."

Check out MongoDB on Google Cloud Marketplace to learn more about what these partners can do for your business.

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Improved Developer Experience with the Atlas Admin API

With MongoDB Atlas, we meet our developers where they are and offer multiple ways to get started and work with Atlas. One of the ways to get started programmatically with Atlas is through the Atlas Administration API. It provides programmatic access to Atlas resources such as clusters, database users, or backups to name a few, enabling developers to perform operational tasks like creating, modifying, and deleting resources. We are excited to announce two key capabilities that will improve the developer experience when working with the Atlas Administration API. Versioned Atlas Administration API If you use the Atlas Administration API today, you are working with the unversioned Administration API (/v1). We have heard your feedback on the challenges around the API changes not having a clear policy as well as communication gaps about the new features/ deprecations. To address this, we are excited to now introduce resource-level versioning with our new versioned Atlas Administration API ( /v2). Here is what you can expect: More predictability and consistency in handling API changes: With this new versioning, any breaking changes that can impact your code will only be introduced in a new resource version. You can rest assured that no breaking changes will affect your production code running the current, stable version. Also, deprecation will occur with the introduction of a new stable API resource version. This will give you at least 1 year to upgrade before the removal of the deprecated resource version. It adds more predictability to what’s coming to the API. Minimum impact with resource-based versioning: With the resource level versioning, whenever we talk about API versions we’re referring to the actual API resource versions represented by date. So once you migrate from the current unversioned Administration API (/v1) to the new versioned Administration API (/v2), this will point to version 2023-02-01. To make the initial migration process smooth and easy this first resource version applies to all API resources (e.g. /serverless, /backup, /clusters, etc.). However, moving forward, each resource can introduce a new version (e.g. /serverless can move to 2023-06-01, /backup can stay on 2023-02-01) independently from each other at various points in time. The advantage is that if you have not implemented the e.g. /serverless resource and say a new version is introduced, you will not need to take any action. You will only need to take action if and when the resources you are utilizing are deprecated. More time to plan your migration: Once a particular resource version is deprecated, there will be enough time ( 12 months) before it is removed, so this will give you ample time to plan and transition to the new version. Improved context and visibility: Our updated documentation has all the details to guide you through the versioning process. Whether it’s a release of a new endpoint, deprecation of an existing resource version, or a non-breaking change to a #stable resource - all of them are now tracked on a dedicated and automatically updated Changelog . Other than that we provide more visibility and context on any API changes through the API specification which presents information for all stable and deprecated resource versions enabling you to access documentation that’s relevant for your particular case. We have made it very simple for you to get started with the new versioned Administration API (/v2). To start using it you need to migrate from the current Unversioned Administration API (/v1) to the new Versioned Administration API (/v2). This migration can be done smoothly by making two changes in your code: Update the path of each endpoint from /v1 to /v2 . Add a version header to each endpoint: application/vnd.atlas.2023-02-01+json. The 2023-02-01 version will have a long support timeframe of 2 years from its deprecation, giving you ample time to transition. Read more about the versioned Admin API. To learn more about the transition process, read our migration guide . Go SDK for the Atlas Administration API One of the mechanisms that simplifies interaction with APIs is the availability of SDKs. To make it easy to get started and work with the Versioned Administration API, we are excited to introduce the new Go SDK for the Administration API. If you are a Go developer and have interacted with the Atlas Administration API, you must be familiar with our current Go client. We are now introducing the new Go SDK for the Atlas Admin API. This provides a significantly improved developer experience for Go developers as it supports full endpoint coverage, improves the speed of getting started with the versioned Admin API, provides you a consistent experience when working with the Admin API, and gives you the choice of version for better control of changes and the impact on the scripts. Let’s look at some of the benefits you can expect: Full Atlas Administration API endpoint coverage: The new Go SDK allows you to access all the features and capabilities that the Atlas Administration API offers today with full endpoint coverage. This ensures you can programmatically leverage the full breadth of the developer data platform. Flexibility in choosing the API resource version: When interacting with the new versioned Atlas Administration API through the Go SDK client, you can choose a particular version of the Admin API, giving you control over when you are impacted by breaking changes or always work with the latest version. Ease of use: Your getting started experience for Admin API through the Go SDK client is now much more simplified with fewer lines of code since it includes pre-built functions, structs, and methods that encapsulate the complexity of HTTP requests, authentication, error handling, versioning, and other low-level details. Immediate access to updates: When using the new Go SDK, you can immediately access any newly released Atlas Admin API capabilities. And every time a new version of Atlas is released, the SDK will be quickly updated and continuously maintained, ensuring compatibility with any changes in the API. Get started today with the GoSDK client. Also, refer to our migration guide to learn more.

June 15, 2023
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Unmasking Deception: Harnessing the Power of MongoDB Atlas and Amazon SageMaker Canvas for Fraud Detection

Financial services organizations face growing risks from cybercriminals. High-profile hacks and fraudulent transactions undermine faith in the industry. As technology evolves, so do the techniques employed by these perpetrators, making the battle against fraud a perpetual challenge. Existing fraud detection systems often grapple with a critical limitation: relying on stale data. In a fast-paced and ever-evolving landscape, relying solely on historical information is akin to driving by looking into the rearview mirror. Cybercriminals continuously adapt their tactics, forcing financial institutions to stay one step ahead. The newest tactics often can be seen in the data. That's where the power of operational data comes into play. By harnessing real-time data, fraud detection models can be trained on the most accurate and relevant clues available. MongoDB Atlas, a highly scalable and flexible developer data platform, coupled with Amazon SageMaker Canvas, an advanced machine learning tool, presents a groundbreaking opportunity to revolutionize fraud detection. By leveraging operational data, this synergy holds the key to proactively identifying and combating fraudulent activities, enabling financial institutions to safeguard their systems and protect their customers in an increasingly treacherous digital landscape. MongoDB Atlas MongoDB Atlas , the developer data platform is an integrated suite of data services centered around a cloud database designed to accelerate and simplify how developers build with data. MongoDB Atlas's document-oriented architecture is a game-changer for financial services organizations. Its ability to handle massive amounts of data in a flexible schema empowers financial institutions to effortlessly capture, store, and process high-volume transactional data in real-time. This means that every transaction, every interaction, and every piece of operational data can be seamlessly integrated into the fraud detection pipeline, ensuring that the models are continuously trained on the most current and relevant information available. With MongoDB Atlas, financial institutions gain an unrivaled advantage in their fight against fraud, unleashing the full potential of operational data to create a robust and proactive defense system. Amazon SageMaker Canvas Amazon SageMaker Canvas revolutionizes the way business analysts leverage AI/ML solutions by offering a powerful no-code platform. Traditionally, implementing AI/ML models required specialized technical expertise, making it inaccessible for many business analysts. However, SageMaker Canvas eliminates this barrier by providing a visual point-and-click interface to generate accurate ML predictions for classification, regression, forecasting, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision (CV). SageMaker Canvas empowers business analysts to unlock valuable insights, make data-driven decisions, and harness the power of AI without being hindered by technical complexities. It boosts collaboration between business analysts and data scientists by sharing, reviewing, and updating ML models across tools. It brings the realm of AI/ML within reach, allowing analysts to explore new frontiers and drive innovation within their organizations. Reference Architecture The above reference architecture includes an end-to-end solution for detecting different types of fraud in the banking sector, including card fraud detection, identity theft detection, account takeover detection, money laundering detection, consumer fraud detection, insider fraud detection and mobile banking fraud detection to name a few. The architecture diagram shown here illustrates model training and near real-time inference. The operational data stored in MongoDB Atlas is written to the Amazon S3 bucket using the Triggers feature in Atlas Application Services. Thus stored, data is used to create and train the model in Amazon SageMaker Canvas. The SageMaker Canvas stores the metadata for the model in the S3 bucket and exposes the model endpoint for inference. For step-by-step instructions on how to build the fraud detections solution mentioned above with MongoDB Atlas and Amazon SageMaker Canvas, read our tutorial .

June 21, 2023