I lost my MongoDB cluster to a war zone. Here's the architecture I'm building instead

https://meetadev.com/series/logs-from-the-battlefield
My MongoDB Atlas cluster was hosted in AWS Bahrain. In June 2025, regional tensions escalated, missiles flew over the Gulf, and I watched my production database sit one bad afternoon away from being inaccessible — or gone.

Atlas didn't fail. The architecture did. A single-region deployment in a geopolitically active zone is a topology decision, and I made the wrong one.

This series is me rebuilding it the right way — in public, end to end, no shortcuts.

What I'm building over the next several videos:
- A 3-node MongoDB Community replica set across Azure UAE North, South Africa North, and West Europe
- Two geopolitical zones for genuine disaster recovery (not just multi-AZ theater)
- Self-managed PKI with x.509 authentication — financial-grade audit trail, per-node identity
- Azure encryption at host with customer-managed keys in Key Vault
- RBAC with custom roles, tiered RPO/RTO, point-in-time recovery, observability, failure drills
- A full STRIDE + insider threat model driving every control

What this series is NOT:
- A "MongoDB vs Postgres" video
- An Atlas hit piece (Atlas is excellent — I made the wrong topology choice)
- Theory. Every video documents something I actually built and broke and fixed.

The thesis: self-hosting isn't the fix. Topology is the fix. Self-hosting is just the implementation choice that lets me prove it.

📍 Episode 1 (Architecture & Threat Model) drops next. Subscribe so you catch it.

📝 Written companion: https://meetadev.com/series/logs-from-the-battlefield
🔗 Full series index: https://meetadev.com/series/logs-from-the-battlefield
💼 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omollo-cliff/
🌐 Meetadev:https://meetadev.com/series/logs-from-the-battlefield

Chapters:
00:00 The Bahrain incident
0X:XX Why Atlas wasn't the problem
0X:XX What I'm building (architecture overview)
0X:XX The 9 episodes ahead
0X:XX How to follow along

#MongoDB #SelfHosted #DatabaseArchitecture #Azure #DevOps

Видео I lost my MongoDB cluster to a war zone. Here's the architecture I'm building instead канала Osego Codes