Huh, I never really thought of that as a unique property of Sandstorm, but you're absolutely right, this is essential to any software intended to be operated by

Huh, I never really thought of that as a unique property of Sandstorm, but you're absolutely right, this is essential to any software intended to be operated by a non-technical end user, and Sandstorm is aggressive about it (e.g. apps are always shut down by abrupt SIGKILL and whenever someone requested that we add some sort of clean shutdown notification, I refused). Ironically, Sandstorm itself is still stuck running on Mongo version 2.6 (a decade old!) because Mongo can't necessarily be updated in an unattended way. Of course, we could never ask every Sandstorm user to do some manual process to upgrade it. Meanwhile, newer versions of the Mongo Node.js client library don't support such old Mongo, which means Sandstorm cannot actually update that package nor any of the packages that depend on it anymore. And this is why Sandstorm is now stuck in time and no longer receiving updates. :( It was clearly a big mistake for Sandstorm to use Mongo. We chose it because we built the UI on Meteor, which was really only designed to work wing Mongo. In retrospect I wish we'd used SQLite, whose backwards-compatibility guarantee has now reached twenty years.