Typically, DevOps engineers distribute the database into shards to support a massive amount of data. There comes a time, however, when the data needs to be moved. For example, let's say a host server needs to be upgraded or replaced. In MongoDB version 3.2 and earlier, this process could be quite daunting. In one documented case, a 500 GB shard took 13 days to migrate. In MongoDB 3.4, parallelism support was provided that sped up the migration process. Part of the reason for the improvement was that the chunk balancer logic was moved to the config server (https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/sharded-cluster-config-servers/#config-servers), which must be configured as part of a replica set.Â
Another improvement, available with MongoDB 4.0.3, allows the sharded cluster balancer (https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/sharding-balancer-administration/#sharded-cluster-balancer) to preallocate chunks if zones and ranges have been defined, which facilitates...
