How can Atlas be a stable or viable solution for any project when it forces random and breaking version changes on you overnight?

MongoDB Atlas
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Out of nowhere, our users let us know that a significant part of our website had stopped working overnight. After a lot of unscheduled 3am work, we found this was because M0, M2 and M5 clusters were upgraded to a new MongoDB version without any warning or agreement from us. After talking to support, they informed us that automatic version upgrades happened to clusters without warning and these could not be disabled without upgrading to a dedicated cluster (+720% more dollar).

These MongoDB version upgrades can break your app or website overnight, and means Atlas is no longer a viable solution for us. Without bringing mLab into it - but, you know, bringing mLab into it - we never had such issues on mLab.

We did get a $10 coupon from support and they pointed us to these forums, so yeah let me know what you reckon.

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Hi Daniel,

I very much regret that this happened to you. We clearly need to improve our communications process and evolve our product toward no more breaking changes period. I want to re-earn your trust even if it will be a long road to do so.

You should have received numerous heads-up emails about the upgrade of the Atlas shared tier (M0/M2/M5) clusters to MongoDB 4.4. We will be in touch to investigate how that didn’t happen.

It’s important to emphasize that the vast majority of applications do not rely on capability in MongoDB 4.2 that changed in 4.4: nevertheless it pains us that there are exceptions and we will make major investments in future to reduce the chance of that happening.

-Andrew

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Hi Andrew,
We having the exact same crisis now in 2023.
Atlas upgraded without any notice to v6.0.5 and broke
our app completely (its not usable without db connection, even if all errors handled properly).

It seems latest mongodb client v5.2.0 is not supporting the breaking changes:

https://www.mongodb.com/docs/manual/legacy-opcodes/#op_query

Same as Daniel we cannot change cluster version as we are using M2 instances.

Please assist @Andrew_Davidson

Thanks

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Same happened today a query of mine was working perfectly fine. But today it stopped working and it broked many parts of the application.

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Hi Elis, Khaziq_N_A,

We would like to apologize for the inconvenience this caused — it is certainly is not the experience we strive for and we will make sure to reduce the likelihood of this happening in the future.
Please reach out via the Chat in the Atlas UI or through support and we will be sure to assist.

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Same happened here. We couldn’t find a solution. @Elis did you find a solution?

Thanks in advance.

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Two years later, the same has occurred again - MongoDB has broken my project after forcing an update on my production database under the hood.

Without doubt, Atlas is not a stable or viable solution for any production project. Can anyone recommend alternatives, similar to mLab before it was bought out and taken down by MongoDB Atlas?