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Using MongoDB Atlas Vector and GeoJSON Search with Modal

This example repo demonstrates how to use Modal and MongoDB together to build a full-stack application.

The application is a hybrid search engine, like the retrieval engines that power RAG chatbots, but for satellite images of the state of California. Images can be searched based on their geospatial and temporal metadata or based on their semantic content as captured by a pre-trained embedding model.

We use the Clay foundation model for embeddings and we source the images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellites.

You can take our deployment of the application for a spin here.

Overview

At the center of the application is a MongoDB Atlas instance that stores metadata for a collection of satellite images.

Modal orchestrates the compute around that database: retrieving data from elsewhere and storing it in the database, computing vector embeddings for the data in the database, and serving both a frontend and a client.

The dataflow looks something like this:

  1. Every few days, the European Space Agency’s Sentinel Satellites complete a full pass over the entire Earth, including California. The images are made available via a public STAC API.
  2. Every day, we run a job on Modal that queries that STAC API for new images of California and store the metadata in a MongoDB Atlas database instance.
  3. Asynchronously, we run a job on Modal to check which entries in the database don’t have an associated embedding. These images are then sent to a serverless embedding service running on Modal. We send the resulting embeddings to the database.
  4. We host a database client on Modal that allows the application’s developers to manipulate the data. This client is also used by two web endpoints for vector and geospatial search queries powered by Atlas Search.
  5. Finally, we run a simple static FastAPI server on Modal that serves an Alpine JS frontend for executing those queries and rendering their results.

This entire application — from API queries and frontend UI to GPU inference and hybrid search — is delivered using nothing but Modal and MongoDB Atlas. Setting it up for yourself requires only credentials on these platforms and a few commands, detailed below.

Deploying the Backend

Setup: Modal and MongoDB Atlas

You’ll need a Python environment on your local machine. Any recent version of Python should do. Most of the dependencies will be installed in environments on Modal, so you don’t need to worry quite so much.

Follow the instructions here to set up your Modal account. The $30/month of compute included in Modal’s free tier is more than enough to deploy and host this example.

You’ll also need an account on MongoDB Atlas. You can find instructions here. We prefer the UI, rather than the CLI, for setup. The free tier is more than sufficient to run this example.

You’ll want to create a database called modal-examples. Make sure it’s accessible from all IP addresses. In the process, you will create a database user with a password. Navigate to the Modal Secrets dashboard here and add this information, as well as the connection string for your database, to a Modal Secret based on the MongoDB template available in the dashboard.

MongoDB Client (database.py)

If your Modal Secret and MongoDB Atlas instance are set up correctly, you should be able to run the following command:

modal run backend.database::MongoClient.ping

Once that command is working, you can start manipulating the database from Modal.

To start, you’ll want to add an Area of Interest (AOI) to the database:

modal run backend.database --action add_aoi

By default, it’s the state of California as defined by the GeoJSON in this repository’s data folder (originally retrieved from the geojsonio GitHub repository). You can pass a different GeoJSON file to the add_aoi action with the --target flag.

The modal run command is used for one-off tasks. To deploy the database client for use in other parts of the app along with the webhooks that anyone can use to run search queries, we use modal deploy:

modal deploy backend.database

Those webhooks come with interactive OpenAPI docs, which you can access by navigating to the /docs route of the deployment’s URL. You should see that URL in the terminal output. You can also find the URL in the app’s Modal dashboard.

For our deployment, the URL for the interactive docs for the geographic search endpoint is https://modal-labs--clay-mongo-client-geo-search.modal.run/docs.

If you haven’t yet run the backfill jobs for your database instance, as described below, this search will not return any results, but you can use it to check that the database client is deployed.

Backfill and Updates (extract.py)

We add data to the database by querying the Sentinel STAC API for images.

Run the following command to search for images in the AOI from the preceding week and add them to the database:

modal run backend.extract

You can either check the results via the Atlas UI or by executing a search query in the database client’s geo search webhook, as described above.

To regularly update the database with new images, we deploy the app defined in extract.py:

modal deploy backend.extract

This app also runs a regular job to add embeddings to the images in the database.

But it doesn’t compute the embeddings itself — embeddings are provided by a separate service, which is described next.

Clay Embeddings Service (embeddings.py)

To build the environment for the embeddings service and to test the embedding engine on some sample data, execute the following command:

modal run backend.embeddings

To deploy this on Modal, we again use modal deploy:

modal deploy backend.embeddings

Putting It All Together

Now that the embedding service is deployed, we can add vectors by invoking the enrich_vectors function in extract with modal run:

modal run backend.extract::enrich_vectors

This command will ensure all the images in the database have embeddings.

You should be able to observe them on records viewed via the Atlas UI or by executing a search query via the database client’s geo search webhook, as described previously.

To use the embeddings for search, we recommend running the frontend UI, which we walk through next.

Deploying the Frontend

The frontend is much simpler than the backend. It comprises a small Alpine JS app and a FastAPI Python server to deliver it to client browsers.

You can play with our deployment of the frontend here.

Alpine App (app.js)

The Alpine app provides a basic interface for constructing geo search queries by clicking on a map and viewing results. Clicking on the returned images triggers a vector search for similar images. Images can be furthermore filtered by date using the date pickers.

FastAPI Server (serve.py)

This app is served to the client by a FastAPI server.

To deploy it, run the following command:

modal deploy frontend