Release Highlights

Using remote file server for backups (tech preview)

The new filesystem backup storage type was added in this release in addition to already existing s3 and azure types.
It allows users to mount a remote file server to a local directory, and make Percona Backup for MongoDB using this directory as a storage for backups. The approach is based on common Network File System (NFS) protocol, and should be useful in network-restricted environments without S3-compatible storage or in cases with a non-standard storage service supporting NFS access.

To use NFS-capable remote file server as a backup storage, user needs to mount the remote storage as a sidecar volume in the replsets section of the Custom Resource (and also configsvrReplSet in case of a sharded cluster):

replsets:
  ...
  sidecarVolumes:
  - name: backup-nfs
    nfs:
      server: "nfs-service.storage.svc.cluster.local"
      path: "/psmdb-some-name-rs0"
  ...

Finally, this new storage needs to be configured in the same Custom Resource as a normal storage for backups:

backup:
  ...
  storages:
    backup-nfs:
      filesystem:
        path: /mnt/nfs/
          type: filesystem
  ...
  volumeMounts:
  - mountPath: /mnt/nfs/
    name: backup-nfs

See more in our documentation about this storage type.

Generated passwords for custom MongoDB users

A new improvement for the declarative management of custom MongoDB users brings the possibility to use automatic generation of users passwords. When you specify a new user in deploy/cr.yaml configuration file, you can omit specifying a reference to an already existing Secret with the user’s password, and the Operator will generate it automatically:

...
users:
  - name: my-user
    db: admin
    roles:
      - name: clusterAdmin
        db: admin
      - name: userAdminAnyDatabase
        db: admin

Find more details on this automatically created Secret in our documentation.

Percona Server for MongoDB 8.0 support

Percona Server for MongoDB 8.0 is now supported by the Operator in addition to 6.0 and 7.0 versions. The appropriate images are now included into the list of Percona-certified images. See this blogpost for details about the latest MongoDB 8.0 features with the added reliability and performance improvements.

New Features

• K8SPSMDB-1109: Backups can now be stored on a remote file server
• K8SPSMDB-921: IAM Roles for Service Accounts (IRSA) allow automating access to AWS S3 buckets based on Identity Access Management with no need to specify the S3 credentials explicitly
• K8SPSMDB-1133: Manual change of Replica Set Member Priority in Percona Server MongoDB Operator is now possible with the new replsetOverrides.MEMBER-NAME.priority Custom Resource option
• K8SPSMDB-1164: Add the possibility to create users in the $external database for external authentication purposes

Improvements

• K8SPSMDB-1123: Percona Server for MongoDB 8.0 is now supported
• K8SPSMDB-1171: The declarative user management was enchanced with the possibility to automatically generate passwords
• K8SPSMDB-1174: Telemetry was improved to to track whether the custom users and roles management, automatic volume expansion, and multi-cluster services features are enabled
• K8SPSMDB-1179: It is now possible to configure externalTrafficPolicy for mongod, configsvr and mongos instances
• K8SPSMDB-1205: Backups in unmanaged clusters are now supported, removing a long-standing limitation of cross-site replication that didn’t allow backups on replica clusters

Bugs Fixed

• K8SPSMDB-1215: Fix a bug where ExternalTrafficPolicy was incorrectly set for LoadBalancer and NodePort services (Thanks to Anton Averianov for contributing)
• K8SPSMDB-675: Fix a bug where disabling sharding failed on a running cluster with enabled backups
• K8SPSMDB-754: Fix a bug where some error messages had “INFO” log level and therefore were not seen in logs with the “ERROR” log level turned on
• K8SPSMDB-1088: Fix a bug which caused the Operator starting two backup operations if the user patches the backup object while its state is empty or Waiting
• K8SPSMDB-1156: Fix a bug that prevented the Operator with enabled backups to recover from invalid TLS configurations (Thanks to KOS for reporting)
• K8SPSMDB-1172: Fix a bug where backup user’s password username with special characters caused Percona Backup for MongoDB to fail
• K8SPSMDB-1212: Stop disabling balancer during restores, because it is not required for Percona Backup for MongoDB 2.x

Deprecation, Rename and Removal

• The psmdbCluster option from the deploy/backup/backup.yaml manifest used for on-demand backups, which was deprecated since the Operator version 1.12.0 in favor of the clusterName option, has been removed and is no longer supported.
• Percona Server for MongoDB 5.0 has reached its end of life and in no longer supported by the Operator

Supported Platforms

The Operator was developed and tested with Percona Server for MongoDB 6.0.19-16, 7.0.15-9, and 8.0.4-1. Other options may also work but have not been tested. The Operator also uses Percona Backup for MongoDB 2.8.0.

Percona Operators are designed for compatibility with all CNCF-certified
Kubernetes distributions. Our release process includes targeted testing and validation on major cloud provider platforms and OpenShift, as detailed below for Operator version 1.19.0:

• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) 1.28-1.30
• Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) 1.29-1.31
• OpenShift Container Platform 4.14.44 - 4.17.11
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) 1.28-1.31
• Minikube 1.34.0 based on Kubernetes 1.31.0

This list only includes the platforms that the Percona Operators are specifically tested on as part of the release process. Other Kubernetes flavors and versions depend on the backward compatibility offered by Kubernetes itself.