Ryuji Tamagawa gave a presentation on using MongoDB. He introduced MongoDB as a hybrid of NoSQL and SQL that scales easily. To improve performance on AWS, one must understand MongoDB's memory management, the application's workload pattern, and the size of "hot" data that is frequently accessed. MongoDB does not manage memory itself, instead using memory mapping to leverage the OS buffer. It is important to give the OS enough memory to store hot data and account for indexes. Replication can be used to distribute data across multiple instances for high availability. Performance tests showed SSD-backed instance types had faster write times than non-SSD types for storing Wikipedia data in MongoDB.