OpenSearch Migration at Scale

The problem

Search infrastructure underpinned critical internal workflows. Staying on a moving ElasticSearch footprint while meeting security and identity requirements meant a coordinated migration — not a weekend flip of a config flag.

What I led

I drove the migration from ElasticSearch to OpenSearch, including Entra SSO integration, replication planning, and staged rollouts across development, test, and production. The goal was zero-surprise cutovers: each environment validated before the next inherited the change.

Why it mattered

Search clusters are deceptively central. A bad migration doesn’t just break search — it breaks dashboards, log analytics, and teams that assumed the index would always be there. Treating it like a product launch (with rollback paths and explicit verification) was non-negotiable.

What I took away

Large infrastructure migrations are as much coordination and communication as they are technical execution. Identity, data replication, and environment parity were the details that determined whether the project felt smooth or chaotic.