NoSQL technology was pioneered by leading internet companies — including Google, Facebook, Amazon, and LinkedIn — to overcome the limitations of 40-year-old relational database technology for use with modern web applications. Today, enterprises are adopting NoSQL for a growing number of uses cases, a choice that is driven by four interrelated megatrends: Big Users, Big Data, the Internet of Things, and Cloud Computing.

Not long ago, 1,000 daily users of an application was a lot of users, and 10,000 was an extreme case.

Today, nearly 3 billion people are connected to the internet and the amount of time they spend online — about 35 billion hours a month in 2014 — is steadily growing, creating an explosion in the number of concurrent users.

It’s not uncommon for apps to have millions of different users a day, and must support global users 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.