In this chapter, we covered some topics that were not detailed in previous chapters. It is important to apply the best practices according to our workload requirements. Read performance is usually what we want to optimize for; that is why we discussed consolidating queries and the denormalization of our data.

Operations are also important when we go from deployment to ensuring the continuous performance and availability of our cluster. Security is something that we often don't think about until it affects us. That's why we should invest the time beforehand to plan and make sure that we have the measures in place to be sufficiently secure.

Finally, we introduced the concept of checklists to keep track of our tasks and to make sure that we complete all of them before major operational events (deployment, cluster upgrades, moving to sharding from replica sets, and so on).