# Pause/resume Percona Server for MongoDB

There may be external situations when it is needed to shutdown the cluster
for a while and then start it back up (some works related to the maintenance of
the enterprise infrastructure, etc.).

<a name="operator-pause"></a> The `deploy/cr.yaml` file contains a special `spec.pause` key for this.
Setting it to `true` gracefully stops the cluster:

```yaml
spec:
  .......
  pause: true
```

To start the cluster after it was shut down just revert the `spec.pause` key
to `false`.