Introducing: Multi-Kubernetes Cluster Deployment Support

Rutuja Rajwade and Dan Mckean
October 10, 2024 | Updated: December 4, 2024
#Kubernetes

Resilience and scalability are critical for today's production applications. MongoDB and Kubernetes are both well known for their ability to support those needs to the highest level. TA single Kubernetes cluster is typically limited to a single region, so to better enable developers using MongoDB and Kubernetes, we’ve introduced a series of updates and capabilities that makes it possible to manage MongoDB across multiple Kubernetes clusters. Since those Kubernetes clusters can be located in different regions, this offers new levels of resilience and control over where your data lives. In addition to the previously released support for running MongoDB replica sets and Ops Manager across multiple Kubernetes clusters, we're excited to announce the public preview release of support for Sharded Clusters spanning multiple Kubernetes clusters (GA to follow in November 2024).

Support for deployment across multiple Kubernetes clusters is facilitated through the Enterprise Kubernetes Operator. As a recap for anyone unaware, the Enterprise Operator automates the deployment, scaling, and management of MongoDB clusters in Kubernetes. It simplifies database operations by handling tasks such as configuration, resizing, upgrades, and failover, whilst ensuring consistent performance and reliability in the Kubernetes environment.

Multi-Kubernetes cluster deployment support enhances availability, resilience, and scalability for critical MongoDB workloads, empowering developers to efficiently manage these workloads within Kubernetes. This approach unlocks the highest level of availability and resilience by allowing shards to be located closer to users and applications, increasing geographical flexibility and reducing latency for globally distributed applications.

Deploying replica sets across multiple Kubernetes clusters

MongoDB replica sets are engineered to ensure high availability, data redundancy, and automated failover in database deployments. A replica set consists of multiple MongoDB instances—one primary and several secondary nodes—all maintaining the same dataset. The primary node handles all write operations, while the secondary nodes replicate the data and are available to take over as primary if the original primary node fails. This architecture is critical for maintaining continuous data availability, especially in production environments where downtime can be costly.

Support for deploying MongoDB replica sets across multiple Kubernetes clusters helps remove the Kubernetes cluster itself as a single point of failure. Deploying MongoDB replica sets across multiple Kubernetes clusters enables you to distribute your data, not only across nodes in the Kubernetes cluster, but across different clusters and geographic locations, ensuring your deployments operational (even if one or more Kubernetes clusters or locations fail) and facilitating faster disaster recovery.

To learn more about how to deploy replica sets across multiple Kubernetes clusters using the Enterprise Kubernetes Operator, visit our documentation.

Sharding MongoDB across multiple Kubernetes clusters

While replica sets duplicate data for resilience (and higher read rates), MongoDB sharded clusters divide the data up between shards, each of which is effectively a replica set, providing resilience for each portion of the data. Crucially, this also helps your database handle large datasets and higher-throughput operations since each shard has a primary member handling write operations to that portion of the data; this allows MongoDB to scale up the write throughput horizontally, rather than requiring vertical scaling of every member of a replica set. In a Kubernetes environment, each shard can now be deployed across multiple Kubernetes clusters, giving every shard higher resilience in the event of a loss of a Kubernetes cluster or an entire geographic location. This also offers the ability to locate shards or their primaries in the same region as the applications or users accessing that portion of the data, reducing latency and improving user experience. Sharding is particularly useful for applications with large datasets and those requiring high availability and resilience as they grow.

Support for sharding MongoDB across multiple Kubernetes clusters is currently in public preview and will be generally available in November.

Deploying Ops Manager across multiple Kubernetes clusters

Ops Manager is the self-hosted management erver that supports automation, monitoring, and backup of MongoDB on your own infrastructure.

Ops Manager's most critical function is backup of MongoDB deployments, and deploying it across multiple Kubernetes clusters greatly improves resilience and disaster recovery for your MongoDB deployments in Kubernetes. With Ops Manager distributed across several Kubernetes clusters, you can ensure that backups of deployments remain robust and available, even if one Kubernetes cluster or site fails. Furthermore, it allows Ops Manager to efficiently manage and monitor MongoDB deployments that are themselves distributed across multiple clusters, improving central oversight of your deployments.

To learn more about how to deploy Ops Manager across multiple Kubernetes clusters using the Enterprise Kubernetes Operator, visit our documentation.

To leverage multi-Kubernetes-cluster support, you can get started with the Enterprise Kubernetes Operator.

← Previous

Building Gen AI with MongoDB & AI Partners | September 2024

Last week I was in London for MongoDB.local London —the 19th stop of the 2024 MongoDB.local tour—where MongoDB, our customers, and our AI partners came together to share solutions we’ve been building that enable companies to accelerate their AI journey. I love attending these events because they offer an opportunity to celebrate our collective achievements, and because it’s great to meet so many (mainly Zoom) friends in person! One of the highlights of MongoDB.local London 2024 was the release of our reference architecture with our MAAP partners AWS and Anthropic , which supports memory-enhanced AI agents. This architecture is already helping businesses streamline complex processes and develop smarter, more responsive applications. We also announced a robust set of vector quantization capabilities in MongoDB Atlas Vector Search that will help developers build powerful semantic search and generative AI applications with more scale—and at a lower cost. Now, with support for the ingestion of scalar quantized vectors, you can import and work with quantized vectors from your embedding model providers of choice, including MAAP partners Cohere, Nomic, and others. A big thank you to all of MongoDB’s AI partners, who continually amaze me with their innovation. MongoDB.local London was another great reminder of the power of collaboration, and I’m excited for what lies ahead as we continue to shape the future of AI together. As the Brits say: Cheers! Welcoming new AI and tech partners In September we also welcomed seven new AI and tech partners that offer product integrations with MongoDB. Read on to learn more about each great new partner! Arize Arize AI is a platform that helps organizations visualize and debug the flow of data through AI applications by quickly identifying bottlenecks in LLM calls and understanding agentic paths. "At Arize AI, we are committed to helping AI teams build, evaluate, and troubleshoot cutting-edge agentic systems. Partnering with MongoDB allows us to provide a comprehensive solution for managing the memory and retrieval that these systems rely on”, said Jason Lopatecki, co-founder and CEO of Arize AI. “With MongoDB’s robust vector search and flexible document storage, combined with Arize’s advanced observability and evaluation tools, we’re empowering developers to confidently build and deploy AI applications." Baseten Baseten provides the applied AI research and infrastructure needed to serve custom and open-source machine learning models performantly, scalably, and cost-efficiently. " We're excited to partner with MongoDB to combine their scalable vector database with Baseten's high-performance inference infrastructure and high-performance models. Together, we're enabling companies to build and deploy generative AI applications, such as RAG apps, that not only scale infinitely but also deliver optimal performance per dollar,” said Tuhin Srivastava, CEO of Baseten. “This partnership empowers developers to bring mission-critical AI solutions to market faster, while maintaining cost-effectiveness at every stage of growth." Doppler Doppler is a cloud-based platform that helps teams manage, organize, and secure secrets across environments and applications that can be used throughout the entire development lifecycle. “Doppler rigorously focuses on making the easy path, the most secure path for developers. This is only possible with deep product partnerships with all the tooling developers have come to love. We are excited to join forces with MongoDB to make zero-downtime secrets rotation for non-relational databases effortlessly simple to set up and maintenance-free,” said Brian Vallelunga, founder and CEO of Doppler. “This will immediately bolster the security posture of a company’s most sensitive data without any additional overhead or distractions." Haize Labs Haize Labs automates language model stress testing at massive scales to discover and eliminate failure modes. This, alongside their inference-time mitigations and observability tools, enables the risk-free adoption of AI. " We're thrilled to partner with MongoDB in empowering companies to build RAG applications that are both powerful yet secure, safe, and reliable,” said Leonard Tang, co-founder and CEO of Haize Labs. “MongoDB Atlas has streamlined the process of developing production-ready GenAI systems, and we're excited to work together to accelerate customers' journey to trust and confidence in their GenAI initiatives." Modal Modal is a serverless platform for data and AI/ML engineers to run and deploy code in the cloud without having to think about infrastructure. Run generative AI models, large-scale batch jobs, job queues, and more, all faster than ever before. “The coming wave of intelligent applications will be built on the potent combination of foundation models, large-scale data, and fast search,” explained Charles Frye, AI Engineer at Modal. “MongoDB Atlas provides an excellent platform for storing, querying, and searching data, from hot new techniques like vector indices to old standbys like lexical search. It's the perfect counterpart to Modal's flexible compute, like serverless GPUs. Together, MongoDB and Modal make it easy to get started with this new paradigm, and then they make it easy to scale it out to millions of users querying billions of records & maxing out thousands of GPUs.” Portkey AI Portkey AI is an AI gateway and observability suite that helps companies develop, deploy, and manage LLM-based applications. " Our partnership with MongoDB is a game-changer for organizations looking to operationalize AI at scale. By combining Portkey's LLMOps expertise with MongoDB's comprehensive data solution, we're enabling businesses to deploy, manage, and scale AI applications with unprecedented efficiency and control,” said Ayush Garg, Chief Technology Officer of Portkey AI. “Together, we're not just streamlining the path from POC to production; we're setting a new standard for how businesses can leverage AI to drive innovation and deliver tangible value." Reka Reka offers fully multimodal models including images, videos with audio, text, and documents to empower AI agents that can see, hear, and speak. "At Reka, we know how challenging it can be to retrieve information buried in unstructured multimodal data. We are excited to join forces with MongoDB to help companies test and optimize multimodal RAG features for faster production deployment,” said Dani Yogatama, CEO of Reka. “Our models understand and reason over multimodal data including text, tables, and images in PDF documents or conversations in videos. Our joint solution streamlines the whole RAG development lifecycle, speeding up time to market and helping companies deliver real values to their customers faster." But wait, there's more! To learn more about building AI-powered apps with MongoDB, check out our AI Resources Hub , and stop by our Partner Ecosystem Catalog to read about our integrations with MongoDB’s ever-evolving AI partner ecosystem.

October 9, 2024
Next →

MongoDB’s 2024 Year in Review

It’s hard to believe that another year is almost over! 2024 was a transformative year for MongoDB, and it was marked by both innovation and releases that further our commitment to empowering customers, developers, and partners worldwide. So without further ado, let’s dive into MongoDB’s 2024 highlights. We’ll also share our executive team’s predictions of what 2025 might have in store. A look back at 2024 MongoDB 8.0: The most performant version of MongoDB ever In October we released MongoDB 8.0 , the fastest, most resilient, secure, and reliable version of MongoDB yet. Architectural optimizations in MongoDB 8.0 have significantly improved the database’s performance, with 36% faster reads and 59% higher throughput for updates. Our new architecture also makes horizontal scaling cheaper and faster. Finally, working with encrypted data is easier than ever, thanks to the addition of range queries in Queryable Encryption (which allows customers to encrypt, store, and perform queries directly on data). Whether you’re a startup building your first app, or you’re a global enterprise managing mission-critical workloads, MongoDB 8.0 offers unmatched power and flexibility, solidifying MongoDB’s place as the world’s most popular document database. Learn more about what makes 8.0 the best version of MongoDB ever on the MongoDB 8.0 page . Delivering customer value with the MongoDB AI Applications Program AI applications have become a cornerstone of modern software, and MongoDB is committed to equipping customers with the technology, tools, and support they need to succeed on their AI journey. That’s why we launched the MongoDB AI Applications Program (MAAP) in 2024, a comprehensive program designed to accelerate the development of AI applications. By offering customers resources like access to AI specialists, an ecosystem of leading AI and tech companies, and AI architectural best practices supported by integrated services, MAAP helps solve customers’ most pressing business challenges, unlocks competitive advantages, and accelerates time to value for AI investments. Overall, MAAP’s aim is to set customers on the path to AI success. Visit the MongoDB AI Applications Program page or watch our session from AWS re:Invent to learn more! Advancing AI with MongoDB Atlas Vector Search In 2024, MongoDB further cemented its role in the AI space with enhancements to MongoDB Atlas Vector Search . Recognized in 2024 (for the second consecutive year!) as one of the most loved vector databases , MongoDB continues to provide a scalable, unified, and secure platform for building cutting-edge AI use cases. Recent advancements like vector quantization in Atlas Vector Search help deliver even more value to our customers, enabling them to scale applications to billions of vectors at a lower cost. Head over to our Atlas Vector Search quick start guide to get started with Atlas Vector Search today, or visit our AI resources hub to learn more about how MongoDB can power AI applications. Search Nodes: Performance at scale Search functionality is indispensable in modern applications, and with Atlas Search Nodes, organizations can now optimize their search workloads like never before. By providing dedicated infrastructure for Atlas Search and Vector Search workloads, Search Nodes ensure high performance (e.g., a 40–60% decrease in query times), scalability, and reliability, even for the most demanding use cases. As of this year , Search Nodes are generally available across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. This milestone underscores MongoDB’s commitment to delivering powerful solutions that scale alongside our customers’ needs. To learn more about Search Nodes, check out our documentation or watch our tutorial . Looking ahead: MongoDB’s 2025 predictions After the excitement of the past few years, 2025 will be defined by ensuring that technology investments deliver tangible value. Organizations remain excited about the potential AI and emerging technologies hold to solve real business challenges, but are increasingly focused on maintaining a return on investment. “Enterprises need to innovate faster than ever, but speed is no longer the only measure of success. Increasingly, organizations are laser-focused on ensuring that their technology investments directly address critical business challenges and provide clear ROI and competitive advantage—whether it’s optimizing supply chains, delivering hyper-personalized customer experiences, or scaling operations efficiently,” said Sahir Azam, Chief Product Officer at MongoDB. “In 2025, I expect to see organizations make significant strides in driving this innovation and efficiency by applying AI to more production use cases and by maturing the way they leverage their data to build compelling and differentiated customer experiences.” Indeed, we expect to see organizations make more strategic investments in emerging technologies like gen AI—innovating with a sharp focus on solving business challenges. “In 2025, we can expect the focus to shift from ‘what AI can do’ to ‘what AI should do,’ moving beyond the hype to a clearer understanding of where AI can provide real value and where human judgment is still irreplaceable,” said Tara Hernandez, VP of Developer Productivity at MongoDB. “As we advance, I think we’ll see organizations begin to adopt more selective, careful applications of AI, particularly in areas where stakes are high, such as healthcare, finance, and public safety. A refined approach to AI development will be essential—not only for producing quality results but also to build trust, ensuring these tools genuinely support human goals rather than undermining them.” With more capable, accessible application development tools and customer-focused programs like MAAP at developers’ fingertips, 2025 is an opportunity to make a data-driven impact faster than ever before. "Right now, organizations have an opportunity to leverage their data to reimagine how they do business, to more effectively adapt to a changing world, and to revolutionize our quality of life,” said Andrew Davidson, SVP of Products at MongoDB. “By harnessing our latest technologies, developers can build a foundation for a transformative future." Head over to our updates page to learn more about the new releases and updates from MongoDB in 2024. Keep an eye on our events page to learn what's to come from MongoDB in 2025!

December 19, 2024