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Andre Kurait edited this page Dec 3, 2025 · 44 revisions

Warning

Public Preview: Migration Assistant on Kubernetes is currently in Public Preview. This version does not support live capture and replay use cases. If you need live traffic capture and replay capabilities, please follow the deployment and instructions in the Migration Assistant 2.x release documentation.

Migration Assistant for OpenSearch

Migration Assistant is a tool for migrating data from Elasticsearch and OpenSearch clusters to OpenSearch. It provides a Kubernetes-native, workflow-driven approach to orchestrate migrations using declarative YAML configuration.

Key capabilities

Migration Assistant supports the following migration capabilities:

Capability Description
Metadata migration Migrate index templates, component templates, index settings, and aliases
Document backfill Migrate existing documents using snapshot-based reindexing (RFS)
Version compatibility Support for Elasticsearch 1.x-8.x and OpenSearch 1.x-2.x sources to OpenSearch 1.x-3.x targets

Architecture overview

Migration Assistant runs on Kubernetes and uses Argo Workflows for orchestration. The diagram below shows the architecture on AWS EKS, but Migration Assistant works equivalently on any Kubernetes distribution including GKE, AKS, OpenShift, and self-managed Kubernetes clusters.

Migration Assistant Architecture

For a detailed walkthrough of the migration process, see the Architecture page.

Core components

  • Migration Console: A Kubernetes pod that provides the interface for configuring, submitting, and monitoring migrations. You connect to this pod to run migration commands.
  • Workflow CLI: A command-line tool available within the Migration Console pod for defining migrations in YAML and submitting them as workflows
  • Argo Workflows: Kubernetes-native workflow engine that orchestrates migration tasks
  • RFS (Reindex-from-Snapshot): High-performance document migration using Lucene segment files

Getting started

1. Understand the architecture

Review the Architecture page to understand the end-to-end migration process and components.

2. Check compatibility

Review the Migration Paths page to verify your source and target versions are supported.

3. Deploy Migration Assistant

Choose your deployment option:

4. Learn the Workflow CLI

Understand how to configure and run migrations:

5. Run your migration

Execute your migration workflow:

What's included

Migration Assistant 3.x focuses on snapshot-based migrations:

Feature Included
Index templates
Component templates
Index settings
Index mappings
Aliases
Documents
ISM policies
Security configuration
Kibana/Dashboards objects

Getting help

Clone this wiki locally