Case Study: The Weather Channel achieves real-time severe weather alerts and launches features in hours with MongoDB

The Weather Channel - Customer Case Study

The Weather Channel, a 24/7 weather network with a growing digital audience of about 40 million, faced slow development and scaling limits from a legacy relational database. That backend made launching and iterating mobile and web features — especially mission-critical, location-based severe weather alerts — cumbersome and too slow for a fast-moving, mobile-first user base.

By migrating to MongoDB and using its Cloud Manager, The Weather Channel gained fast ad-hoc queries and secondary-index lookups to push real-time alerts to affected local subscribers and support spikes of about 2 million requests per minute. The move enabled launch cycles measured in hours instead of weeks, simplified scaling to thousands of nodes and petabytes of data, improved radar performance and personalization across devices, and reduced operational cost and complexity.

The Weather Channel

Luke Kolin

Vice President, Systems Architecture