The MongoDB Community Kubernetes Operator allows secure containerized MongoDB deployments in a Kubernetes cluster. The Community Operator is open source and suitable for experimentation, testing, and lightweight production use cases. To deploy a secure MongoDB deployment, users need to create a CustomResourceDefinition, install the operator, add authorizations, define user credentials, and configure TLS with cert-manager. The operator creates a StatefulSet for the replica set and handles automation of the mongod processes. Users can connect to the replica set using the MongoDB connection string or the mongo shell with TLS enabled.