5 Things to Consider for MongoDB Deployment Preparation

MongoDB is a renowned and easy-to-set-up NoSQL database available for DBAs. Many a times, relational database administrators work with MongoDB databases without knowing and understanding the key things about MongoDB. It is advisable for both beginners and experienced professionals to have complete knowledge of MongoDB. Although MongoDB comes with an easy installation and setup, there are certain things a DBA or a MongoDB development company needs to know before deploying MongoDB in production. This article highlights 5 things to consider for MongoDB deployment preparation.

Companies offering MongoDB Development Services need to consider the following to deploy the MongoDB database properly.

 

1.      Set Up User Authentication and Authorization

Database security is one of the major concerns of companies. Today, security is no longer disabled by default for MongoDB. However, it is still easy to start the database without security. No security ultimately makes your database bound to a public IP. Hence, anyone can easily access your database and steal your data.

Therefore, it is wise to add some essential MongoDB security configuration options to your configuration file to safeguard your data. MongoDB can be configured to leverage native LDAP for authentication. Enabling authentication and authorization is one the easiest and simplest ways to make your MongoDB safe and secure. Enabling authorization is the most important configuration option which ensures that only authorized users with specific roles can access your data.

security:   

  authorization: enabled

  keyfile: /path/to/your.keyfile

 

Companies providing MongoDB development services must ensure that the DBAs set up user authentication and authorization in the MongoDB database properly.

2.      Make Minimum Use Replica Sets

With MongoDB, it is very easy to set up replication. It also offers you built-in high availability. So, if in case your primary crashes or is under maintenance, MongoDB automatically switches to one of your secondaries, and your application can run without any disruption. Replica Sets let you offload reads as long as your app can bear subsequent consistency.Moreover, replica sets enable you to offload your backups to a secondary. Another feature about Replica Sets is that only one member of the Replica Sets can accept client writes at a given time. If you want numerous nodes to accept writes, you should opt for sharded clusters in MongoDB.

There are also certain drawbacks of replica sets that a MongoDB development company needs to consider. It is that when reading from a secondary, based on your read preference, you may be reading old data or data that has not been acknowledged by every member of the replica set.

3.      Backups

Database backups are important for companies to keep their database safe from any kind of mishaps. Certain tools like mongoexport,mongodump,Percona Backup for MongoDB, and Ops Manager (only Enterprise Edition) support Point-In-Time Recovery, Hot Backups, Oplog backups, and full and progressive Backups.  Backups in MongoDB can be run from any node in your replica set. It is good to run your backup from a secondary node so that there’s no unnecessary load on the primary node. You can even take screenshots of your data which is possible as long as you pause writes to the node that you’re screenshotting before freezing the file system. This way you get a consistent screenshot of your MongoDB-based database.

4.      Indexes Are Key

Like any other relational database, indexes are essential for MongoDB. Indexes can help accelerate your queries by reducing the data size so that your query returns. This speeds up query performance.Indexes also enable your working set more easily fit into memory. Also,you need to look into your query pattern and search for complete collection scans in yourlogfilesto know where the queries are that could benefit from an index. Moreover, a MongoDB development company needs to make sure that it adheres to the ESR rule when creating indexes and analyzing your query patterns.

Just like other relational databases, indexes are not free, because MongoDB needs to update indexes whenever there is an insert, update, or delete. So, you need to ensure that your indexes are being used and are not unnecessarily decelerating your writes.

5.      Make Sure Your Working Set < RAM Wherever Possible

Fitting your data into RAM will facilitate faster reads than from disk. When you know how much data MongoDB has to read in for your queries, you can decide on the amount of RAM you need to allocate to your database.

It is not always possible to avoid reads from the disk. To evaluate how many reads have to be done from disk, you can use commands such as db.serverStatus() or calculate it with tools like Percona Monitoring and Management. 

Ensure that your filesystem uses the XFS file system recommended by MongoDB, and whenever possible, uses Solid-State Drives (SSD’s) to improve disk performance. You should also make sure to provide sufficient IOPS for your database servers to try and prevent disk bottlenecks because of database workloads. Various cored systems will also perform better as this facilitates quick check pointing for the Wired Tiger storage engine. However, you will still be dependent on going as fast as disks can take you.

Final Thought

MongoDB is easy to set up and has a lower entry barrier. However, there are certain things that a MongoDB Development Company needs to consider for MongoDB deployment preparation. Enabling user authentication and authorization is important for secure deployment. Also, deploying replica sets to ensure high availability, database backups to protect your data, indexes for better query performance, and having adequate memory to cover your queries, all are important for proper MongoDB deployment preparation.

If you’re specialized in providing MongoDB development services, these are some of the things that you should consider before deploying MongoDB.