As a MongoDB DBA, what do I need to know about the meltdown/spectre vulnerabilities?
An official response from Mongo on 1/6/2018 (emphasis mine):


  Recently disclosed research regarding security vulnerabilities in
  almost all modern processors such as Intel and AMD (CVE-2017-5715,
  CVE-2017-5753, and CVE-2017-5754) has prompted public and private
  institutions, including cloud providers, to patch OS and hypervisor
  infrastructures. These patches disable performance optimizing features
  of CPUs, and it is expected that, regardless of OS or cloud provider,
  all workloads will see a performance impact. We are investigating the
  performance implications of these patches to MongoDB on both OS
  kernels as well as cloud hypervisors. 
  
  Hypervisor Patch Impact
  
  As a result of the patches applied by AWS
  between January 3rd and January 5th, 2017, we have observed the
  following:
  
  For high-load benchmarks (e.g. YCSB) we measured a 10-15% impact on
  throughput with some exceptional cases that are still being studied.
  We believe these results are consistent with other industry research.
  We will release additional results (including additional cloud
  providers) in the coming days.
  
  Kernel Patch Impact
  
  This is the impact that customers can expect to
  see when they apply the recommended patches to their cloud VMs or
  on-premises hardware:
  
  At this time we have not seen a substantial signal (either better or
  worse) on major distributions such as Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise
  Linux, and Ubuntu. Based on the industry research we expect that there
  will be some measurable performance impact (although yet to be
  quantified). We will have additional results made available in the
  coming days. If you have any questions or concerns, please file a
  ticket in the Support Portal.
  
  You can read Intel’s white paper to learn more about these
  vulnerabilities.




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