Upgrade ElasticSearch 6.8 to AWS OpenSearch 3.5 with minimum downtime

The moment I received this image in a private Teams chat, I knew it would be a challenge… Not the dance. The migration 🙁

The product depended on a stable Elasticsearch cluster. Uptime had to remain at 100%, and no data could be lost. If the deployment failed, a single misclick could jeopardize the 99.99% SLA commitments we had signed with our partners.

Manually repopulating the data – 26 million records – would have taken an enormous amount of time. Twelve or thirteen hours, perhaps even longer.

The pressure was high. Fortunately, thanks to thorough preparation, detailed documentation, and extensive testing in environments that closely mirrored production, I completed the migration with only 30 seconds of downtime.

Could I have achieved zero downtime? Yes. However, doing so would have increased the risk of data loss. Given the trade-off, 30 seconds of downtime was an acceptable and responsible decision.

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Site to Site ipsec VPN with Strongswan and AWS

The purpose of this article is to explain how to create site to site VPN from a Linux machine to the AWS cloud. I will use Strongswan installed on Ubuntu 20.04 in the Scaleway cloud and AWS VPC. Scaleway offers (at least for now) VPS with Private Subnet and Public IP connected via NAT. In the AWS cloud, I already created VPC with one public and one private subnet – If you do not know how to do it, Neal Davis explains in this video.
In the end, we will have ipsec tunnel, connecting our Linux server with the resources of AWS, placed in a private subnet.

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