What’s next?

You’ve finished the first steps. Use the tasks below to go deeper—whether you’re hardening your application or running the Operator in production environment.

If you’re building an application

Move beyond the basics and get production-ready:

• Enable TLS for application connections — Encrypt traffic between your app and the database.
• Create and manage application users — Use dedicated, least-privilege users instead of the default admin.
• Expose the cluster for production access — Connect from outside the cluster (load balancer or ingress) instead of port-forward.
• Scale the replica set — Add nodes for read capacity and high availability; understand how your driver uses secondaries.
• Understand backups and restore — See how scheduled backups and point-in-time recovery work and what they mean for your app.
• Test your disaster recovery and failover strategies -

If you’re operating the cluster

Run the database and Operator reliably in production:

• Set up scheduled backups — Automate backups and define retention.
• Restore from a backup — Restore on the same cluster or provision a new cluster from a backup.
• Scale the cluster — Add replica set members or plan for sharding when you need more capacity.
• Upgrade the Operator and database — Keep the Operator and Percona Server for MongoDB up to date.
• Secure your data — Encrypt client and server-side traffic either with the cert-manager or manual certificates. Configure data-at-rest encryption to ensure data safety when it is written on disk.
• Control Pod placement — Use affinity and anti-affinity so Pods run on the right nodes.
• Monitor the database and Kubernetes — Use PMM for the database and Kubernetes monitoring for full observability.
• Set up persistent logging — Retain and rotate logs for troubleshooting.
• Plan multi-region or disaster recovery — Replicate across sites and fail over when needed.
• Remove a deployment — Delete a test cluster or decommission an environment.

You can also operate the Operator and database via the Open Everest web interface. See Get started with Percona Everest to try it.

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Last update: March 23, 2026
Created: March 23, 2026