Differently from competitors (e.g.: docdb), atlas forces a minimum of 3 nodes no matter what, and this doesn’t make any sense for a test environment, where we just want to be able to run staging applications on. As a consequence, this incurs 2 totally unutilized nodes we are paying for every month, increasing the costs considerably. Please consider enabling downsizing for test environments!
Thanks.
absolutely understand what you’re saying… the three-node minimum on Atlas might seem like overkill for a test environment, especially if you’re trying to keep costs low. But the thing is, that setup is what helps ensure high availability, even on the lower tiers. but it’s not just for production—having three nodes means if one goes down (like during maintenance or some unexpected issue), your environment stays available.
… might sound like overkill for staging or testing, but Atlas keeps that structure consistent across all tiers so that your test environments behave like production in terms of reliability and failover. Plus, if you’re just looking for something cheaper for testing, there’s the M0 free tier or the M2/M5 shared tiers, which are a lot more budget-friendly while still sticking with the three-node setup for availability.
Hope that clears things up a bit. Let us know if you have any other questions!
Hi Michael. Thank you for the reply, but it doesn’t make sense.
One thing is instance type, another thing is number of instances. I don’t want to have a lower/slower tear. I want to have fewer instances running and under no use, spending resources unnecessarily…
If one wants high availability for the environment, one sets the desired number of instances accordingly, so I don’t buy the explanation about high availability. No environment (perhaps very few exceptions) needs the same availability for their test stg as they need for their production environment.
It’s not only overkill. It’s not desirable for most of us, customers.
But I understand that perhaps this is just the business model of Atlas.