How to Easily Pause and Resume MongoDB Atlas Clusters
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One of the most important things to think about in the cloud is what is burning dollars while you sleep. In the case of MongoDB Atlas, that is your live clusters. The minute you start a cluster (with the exception of our free tier), we start accumulating cost.
If you're using a dedicated cluster—not one of the cheaper, shared cluster types, such as M0, M2 or M5—then it's easy enough to pause a cluster using the Atlas UI, but logging in over 2FA can be a drag. Wouldn't it be great if we could just jump on a local command line to look at our live clusters?
This you can do with a command line tool like
curl, some programming savvy, and knowledge of the MongoDB Atlas Admin API. But who has time for that? Not me, for sure.That is why I wrote a simple script to automate those steps. It's now a Python package up on PyPi called mongodbatlas.
You will need Python 3.6 or better installed to run the script. (This is your chance to escape the clutches of 2.x.)
Just run:
1 $ pip install mongodbatlas 2 Collecting mongodbatlas 3 Using cached mongodbatlas-0.2.6.tar.gz (17 kB) 4 ... 5 ... 6 Building wheels for collected packages: mongodbatlas 7 Building wheel for mongodbatlas (setup.py) ... done 8 Created wheel for mongodbatlas: filename=mongodbatlas-0.2.6-py3-none-any.whl size=23583 sha256=d178ab386a8104f4f5100a6ccbe61670f9a1dd3501edb5dcfb585fb759cb749c 9 Stored in directory: /Users/jdrumgoole/Library/Caches/pip/wheels/d1/84/74/3da8d3462b713bfa67edd02234c968cb4b1367d8bc0af16325 10 Successfully built mongodbatlas 11 Installing collected packages: certifi, chardet, idna, urllib3, requests, six, python-dateutil, mongodbatlas 12 Successfully installed certifi-2020.11.8 chardet-3.0.4 idna-2.10 mongodbatlas-0.2.6 python-dateutil-2.8.1 requests-2.25.0 six-1.15.0 urllib3-1.26.1
Now you will have a script installed called
atlascli. To test the install worked, run atlascli -h.1 $ atlascli -h 2 usage: atlascli [-h] [--publickey PUBLICKEY] [--privatekey PRIVATEKEY] 3 [-p PAUSE_CLUSTER] [-r RESUME_CLUSTER] [-l] [-lp] [-lc] 4 [-pid PROJECT_ID_LIST] [-d] 5 6 A command line program to list organizations,projects and clusters on a 7 MongoDB Atlas organization.You need to enable programmatic keys for this 8 program to work. See https://docs.atlas.mongodb.com/reference/api/apiKeys/ 9 10 optional arguments: 11 -h, --help show this help message and exit 12 --publickey PUBLICKEY 13 MongoDB Atlas public API key.Can be read from the 14 environment variable ATLAS_PUBLIC_KEY 15 --privatekey PRIVATEKEY 16 MongoDB Atlas private API key.Can be read from the 17 environment variable ATLAS_PRIVATE_KEY 18 -p PAUSE_CLUSTER, --pause PAUSE_CLUSTER 19 pause named cluster in project specified by project_id 20 Note that clusters that have been resumed cannot be 21 paused for the next 60 minutes 22 -r RESUME_CLUSTER, --resume RESUME_CLUSTER 23 resume named cluster in project specified by 24 project_id 25 -l, --list List everything in the organization 26 -lp, --listproj List all projects 27 -lc, --listcluster List all clusters 28 -pid PROJECT_ID_LIST, --project_id PROJECT_ID_LIST 29 specify the project ID for cluster that is to be 30 paused 31 -d, --debug Turn on logging at debug level 32 33 Version: 0.2.6
To make this script work, you will need to do a little one-time setup on your cluster. You will need a programmatic key for your cluster. You will also need to enable the IP address that the client is making requests from.
There are two ways to create an API key:
- If you have a single project, it's probably easiest to create a single project API key
- If you have multiple projects, you should probably create an organization API key and add it to each of your projects.
Going to your "Project Settings" page by clicking on the "three dot" button next your project name at the top-left of the screen and selecting "Project Settings". Then click on "Access Manager" on the left side of the screen and click on "Create API Key". Take a note of the public and private parts of the key, and ensure that the key has the "Project Cluster Manager" permission. More detailed steps can be found in the documentation.
Click on the cog icon next to your organization name at the top-left of the screen. Click on "Access Manager" on the left-side of the screen and click on "Create API Key". Take a note of the public and private parts of the key. Don't worry about selecting any specific organization permissions.
Now you'll need to invite the API key to each of the projects containing clusters you wish to control. Click on "Projects' on the left-side of the screen. For each of the projects, click on the "three dots" icon on the same row in the project table and select "Visit Project Settings" Click on "Access Manager", and click on "Invite to Project" on the top-right. Paste your public key into the search box and select it in the menu that appears. Ensure that the key has the "Project Cluster Manager" permission that it will need to pause and resume clusters in that project.
The programmatic key has two parts: a public key and a private key. Both of these are used by the
atlascli program to query the projects and clusters associated with the organization.You can pass the keys in on the command line, but this is not recommended because they will be stored in the command line history. It's better to store them in environment variables, and the
atlascli program will look for these two:ATLAS_PUBLIC_KEY: stores the public key part of the programmatic keyATLAS_PRIVATE_KEY: stores the private part of the programmatic key
Once you have created these environment variables, you can run
atlascli -l to list the organization and its associated projects and clusters. I've blocked out part of the actual IDs with xxxx characters for security purposes:1 $ atlascli -l 2 {'id': 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx464d175c', 3 'isDeleted': False, 4 'links': [{'href': 'https://cloud.mongodb.com/api/atlas/v1.0/orgs/599eeced9f78f769464d175c', 5 'rel': 'self'}], 6 'name': 'Open Data at MongoDB'} 7 Organization ID:xxxxxxxxxxxxf769464d175c Name:'Open Data at MongoDB' 8 project ID:xxxxxxxxxxxxd6522bc457f1 Name:'DevHub' 9 Cluster ID:'xxxxxxxxxxxx769c2577a54' name:'DRA-Data' state=running 10 project ID:xxxxxxxxx2a0421d9bab Name:'MUGAlyser Project' 11 Cluster ID:'xxxxxxxxxxxb21250823bfba' name:'MUGAlyser' state=paused 12 project ID:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx736dfdcddf Name:'MongoDBLive' 13 project ID:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxa9a5a04e7 Name:'Open Data Covid-19' 14 Cluster ID:'xxxxxxxxxxxxxx17cec56acf' name:'pre-prod' state=running 15 Cluster ID:'xxxxxxxxxxxxxx5fbfe04313' name:'dev' state=running 16 Cluster ID:'xxxxxxxxxxxxxx779f979879' name:'covid-19' state=running 17 project ID xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxa132a8010 Name:'Open Data Project' 18 Cluster ID:'xxxxxxxxxxxxxx5ce1ef94dd' name:'MOT' state=paused 19 Cluster ID:'xxxxxxxxxxxxxx22bf6c226f' name:'GDELT' state=paused 20 Cluster ID:'xxxxxxxxxxxxxx5647797ac5' name:'UKPropertyPrices' state=paused 21 Cluster ID:'xxxxxxxxxxxxxx0f270da18a' name:'New-York-Taxi' state=paused 22 Cluster ID:'xxxxxxxxxxxxxx11eab32cf8' name:'demodata' state=running 23 Cluster ID:'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxdcaef39c8' name:'stackoverflow' state=paused 24 project ID:xxxxxxxxxxc9503a77fcce0c Name:'Realm'
To pause a cluster, you will need to specify the
project ID and the cluster name. Here is an example:1 $ atlascli --project_id xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxa132a8010 --pause demodata 2 Pausing 'demodata' 3 Paused cluster 'demodata'
To resume the same cluster, do the converse:
1 $ atlascli --project_id xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxa132a8010 --resume demodata 2 Resuming cluster 'demodata' 3 Resumed cluster 'demodata'
Note that once a cluster has been resumed, it cannot be paused again for a while.
This delay allows the Atlas service to apply any pending changes or patches to the cluster that may have accumulated while it was paused.
Now go save yourself some money. This script can easily be run from a
crontab entry or the Windows Task Scheduler.For a much more full-featured Atlas Admin API in Python, please check out my colleague Matthew Monteleone's PyPI package AtlasAPI.
If you have questions, please head to our developer community website where the MongoDB engineers and the MongoDB community will help you build your next big idea with MongoDB.
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