Features

The Percona Operator for MongoDB is a Kubernetes-native controller that automatically manages the full lifecycle of Percona Server for MongoDB clusters. The Operator offloads your teams from manual day-to-day database management so you can focus on building applications and running the platform.

Core capabilities

Here is what the Operator brings to your infrastructure:

High availability and failover

MongoDB’s built-in high availability — Replica sets and sharding give you data redundancy and automatic failover at the database layer. A replica set uses elections to promote a new primary when the current one fails, with no manual intervention. With sharding, data is distributed across shards (each shard is a replica set), and mongos routes traffic. Both topologies are designed for availability and scale.

What the Operator adds — The Operator runs these topologies reliably in Kubernetes:

• Pod distribution — Use anti-affinity rules to spread replica set members (and optionally arbiters) across nodes so a single node failure does not take down multiple members.
• Health and rescheduling — If a node or Pod fails, Kubernetes reschedules the workload; the replica set reconnects and continues serving traffic.
• Rolling upgrades — Upgrade the Operator and Percona Server for MongoDB with minimal or no downtime.
• Multi-cluster and multi-region — Use multi-cluster or multi-region deployments (including Multi-cluster Services (MCS) where supported) for disaster recovery, cross-site replication, and migration. You can replicate data across clusters or regions so that if one site fails, another can serve traffic.

Backup and restore

Protect your data with Percona Backup for MongoDB, which runs as a sidecar in your database Pods. The Backup and restore overview covers types, storages, restores, and point-in-time recovery. When you are ready to set things up, follow Configure backups.

• Scheduled and on-demand backups — Run backups on a schedule or create one when you need it.
• Logical, physical, incremental, and PVC snapshots — See backup types to pick the right one.
• Point-in-time recovery — Roll back the database to a specific time.
• Restore — Restore on the same cluster or a new cluster.

Automated scaling and resource management

Scale your database infrastructure as demand grows:

• Horizontal scaling — Add replica set members or scale shards and mongos when sharding is enabled.
• Vertical scaling — Adjust CPU and memory limits in the PerconaServerMongoDB custom resource.
• Storage expansion — Expand PersistentVolumeClaims for database volumes when your storage class supports it.
• Pod placement — Use affinity and anti-affinity to control which nodes run MongoDB Pods, arbiters, or mongos.

Security and compliance

Keep your data and backups secure with built-in options:

• Transport encryption — Enable TLS for client and server; use cert-manager or custom certificates.
• Data-at-rest encryption — Encrypt MongoDB data on disk.
• Users and roles — Manage application users and system users; optionally use Vault for system user credentials.
• Backup encryption — Encrypt backups in object storage.

Monitoring and observability

Gain visibility into your database and cluster:

• Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) — Integrate PMM via sidecar for metrics, query analysis, and dashboards.
• Kubernetes monitoring — Monitor the Kubernetes layer alongside the database.
• Logging — Configure persistent logging and log rotation.
• Custom options — Tune MongoDB options and PBM options via the custom resource.
• Sidecars — Add sidecar containers (e.g. custom exporters or tools) to replica set, config server, or mongos Pods.

Understand how it works

The How the Operator works and Design and architecture pages explain the controller model and the components it manages.

Next steps

Get up and running in minutes, whether you build an application or need to deploy and operate the database.

Get started

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Last update: September 2, 2026
Created: September 2, 2026