Sharding administration and monitoring
Sharded MongoDB environments have some unique challenges and limitations compared to single-server or replica-set deployments. In this section, we will explore how MongoDB balances our data across shards using chunks and how we can tweak them if we need to. Together, we will explore some of sharding’s design limitations.
Balancing data – how to track and keep our data balanced
One of the advantages of sharding in MongoDB is that it is mostly transparent to the application and requires minimal administration and operational effort.
One of the core tasks that MongoDB needs to perform continuously is balancing data between shards. No matter whether we implement range-based or hash-based sharding, MongoDB will need to calculate bounds for the hashed field to be able to figure out which shard to direct every new document insert or update toward. As our data grows, these bounds may need to get readjusted to avoid having a hot...
