Comparing Enterprise vs Community MongoDB K8S Operators

Recently I was evaluating MongoDB Kubernetes operators, as one possible way to migrate On-Prem MongoDB servers. I weren’t able to find any comparison, so I had to did it on my own.

Enterprise vs Community MongoDB K8s Operators

Criteria	mongodb-kubernetes-operator	mongodb-enterprise-kubernetes
URL	mongodb-enterprise-kubernetes/	mongodb-kubernetes-operator
License	development, testing, and evaluation purposes only	APACHE
Maturity	General availability, Guthub 181 stars	Opensource, Github 64 stars
Documentation	Github + enterprise-grade documentation: k8s-operator	Github, pretty sparse
Topology	Standalone ReplicaSet ShardedCluster	ReplicaSet
Upgrading	Yes	Yes
Downgrading	Yes	Yes
Scaling	Yes	Yes
TLS:	Yes	Yes
Options	Many: replicaset options	A few
Requests	Yes	No
Limits	Yes	No
PVC	Yes	Yes
PVC configuration	Yes	No, default 10G
Integration with Ops Manager	Yes	No
Monitoring	Yes, via OpsManager	No
Backups	Yes, via OpsManager	No

Results

MongoDB Community Kubernetes Operator is still pretty young and not widely adopted. It supports only ReplicaSet with basic functional. At the moment it is not possible to configure Pod Template options and PVC options, like storageclass or size.

MongoDB Enterprise Kubernetes Operator is more mature, but still in general availability. It provides wide amount of options, allowing finely tune your database. Also it is integrated with OpsManager, providing nice webUI with graphs, managements options and built-in backups. On the downside, due to it’s license, it’s only allowed for development or testing. To use it it production, you have to buy it.

At the time of writing(2020-08-03) Community Operator doesn’t look mature for production use. Enterprise Operator looks good, but it requires purchase.

For us the decision was to use MongoDB Helm Chart with our own IaaC solution.