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MongoDB Academy · Lesson

Security Hardening and Production Checklist

Learners will walk through a production readiness checklist covering authentication, RBAC, TLS, encryption, monitoring, and backup strategy.

The Production Readiness Mindset

Production readiness is not a feature — it is a checklist of disciplines applied before the first real user hits your system. A deployment that passes all functional tests but skips security hardening, monitoring, and backup verification is not production-ready. This final lesson walks through the critical production checklist for a MongoDB deployment, covering authentication, RBAC, TLS, encryption, monitoring, backup, and disaster recovery.

Checklist 1: Authentication Enabled

Verify that authentication is enabled and that no unauthenticated connections are possible. On self-hosted MongoDB, confirm security.authorization: enabled in mongod.conf. On Atlas, authentication is mandatory and cannot be disabled. Test by attempting to connect without credentials — the connection must be refused. Confirm that no user has the root or __system role in production application accounts.

// Verify authentication is required
// (attempt to connect without credentials — should fail)
try {
  const client = new MongoClient('mongodb://localhost:27017')
  await client.connect()
  await client.db('admin').command({ ping: 1 })
  console.log('AUTH MISSING — unauthenticated connections accepted!')
} catch (e) {
  console.log('Good: unauthenticated connections rejected')
}

// List all admin users and their roles
use admin
db.getUsers()  // verify no app user has 'root' role

All lessons in this course

  1. Requirements Analysis and Schema Design
  2. Index Strategy and Query Planner Validation
  3. Scaling Plan: Replica Set to Sharded Cluster
  4. Security Hardening and Production Checklist
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