MongoDB Enterprise Advanced combines a MongoDB license and commercial support with a control plane that runs MongoDB at scale across your infrastructure. Understanding the control plane prepares you to make the decisions that shape how your business runs MongoDB securely, reliably, and efficiently.
The Control Plane
The Enterprise Advanced control plane provides integrated components that automate deployment, lifecycle management, backup, and observability across your MongoDB infrastructure. This approach dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of running MongoDB as a self-hosted database as a service offering for your users or customers.
Without leveraging the Enterprise Advanced control plane features, you would need to build your own orchestration, backup, and monitoring tooling. The MongoDB control plane can be integrated into existing automation, backup and monitoring systems, while saving you the engineering effort of maintaining it.
The goal is to run scalable, production-ready MongoDB clusters with centralized governance and control over what users can provision and configure. When the control plane is in place, application teams provision MongoDB databases through your organization's standard processes, without necessarily touching infrastructure. Your central platform team enforces security policy, manages backup schedules, and scales deployments without becoming an operational bottleneck.
Components
The Enterprise Advanced control plane has three components:
Ops Manager: The central management application. It provides a web UI for manual setup and management, and a REST API for integration with your internal developer platform tooling that empowers developer self-service. Ops Manager has built-in capabilities for deployment automation, security, continuous backup with point-in-time recovery, and MongoDB-specific monitoring and alerting. Ops Manager also supports integrations with third-party authentication, monitoring, and backup systems.
MongoDB Agent: The MongoDB Agent runs on each MongoDB deployment host (for example, a database) that Ops Manager manages, whether that host is a VM, physical server, or Kubernetes pod. The agent executes configuration and management instructions from Ops Manager, supports backup and recovery, and reports telemetry back to Ops Manager.
MongoDB Controllers for Kubernetes (MCK): MCK is the Kubernetes operator for Enterprise Advanced. It manages infrastructure provisioning and MongoDB configuration as Kubernetes custom resources, working in concert with Ops Manager. MCK isn't an alternative to Ops Manager. MCK unlocks the ability for MongoDB to provision infrastructure (Kubernetes pods) to run MongoDB, as well as managing configuration. This can drastically simplify managing MongoDB to provide a database as a service on-prem by saving you building the orchestration layer to tie VM lifecycle management together with MongoDB configuration.
Kubernetes and Enterprise Advanced Search
Kubernetes is optional for Ops Manager and for your MongoDB databases. You can run a full Enterprise Advanced deployment on virtual machines or physical servers, including automated backup, monitoring, orchestration, and commercial support, without Kubernetes.
Kubernetes is required for Enterprise Advanced Search. Search nodes must run on Kubernetes. Enterprise Advanced Search has no VM-based deployment path. If Search is part of your planned deployment, you need Kubernetes for at least the Search tier, regardless of where your primary databases run.
A hybrid topology of MongoDB databases on VMs managed by Ops Manager and Search nodes on Kubernetes managed by MCK is a valid configuration. Customers can add Kubernetes for Search at any time without moving their existing database infrastructure.
Summary
The control plane is the foundation of your MongoDB deployment. Decisions you make up front shape how it operates for its lifetime: how Ops Manager, the MongoDB Agent, and MCK fit your environment, where your databases and Search nodes run, and how your teams provision and secure MongoDB. These choices determine whether you scale smoothly or accumulate operational debt. Planning them in advance lets you run MongoDB as a reliable internal database as a service rather than reworking infrastructure after teams depend on it.