Is Migration Assistant right for you?

Deciding whether to use Migration Assistant depends on your specific upgrade path, infrastructure complexity, and operational goals. This page will help you evaluate whether Migration Assistant is right for your use case—or whether another tool might be a better fit.

Migration Assistant was built to fill important gaps in common migration strategies. For example, if you’re upgrading across multiple major versions—such as from Elasticsearch 6.8 to OpenSearch 2.19—Migration Assistant lets you do this in a single step. Other methods, like rolling upgrades or snapshot restores, require you to upgrade through each major version, often reindexing your data at every step.

Migration Assistant also supports live traffic replication, allowing for zero-downtime migrations. This makes it a strong choice for production environments, where minimizing service disruption is critical.

If your migration is limited to a static cluster configuration (like index templates and aliases), or if you’re not concerned about downtime, simpler tools may be sufficient. But for complex migrations involving real-time traffic or major version jumps, Migration Assistant offers robust, flexible capabilities.

Supported migration paths

The following matrix shows which source versions can be directly migrated to which OpenSearch target versions:

Supported platforms

Source and target platforms

• Self-managed (on premises or hosted by a cloud provider)
• Amazon OpenSearch Service

AWS Regions

Migration Assistant is supported in the following AWS Regions:

• US East (N. Virginia, Ohio)
• US West (Oregon, N. California)
• Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London)
• Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney)
• AWS GovCloud (US-East, US-West)¹

Supported components

Before starting a migration, consider the scope of the components involved. The following table outlines components that should potentially be migrated, indicates whether they are supported by Migration Assistant, and provides recommendations.

Choosing your migration approach

Use the following checklist to determine which Migration Assistant components best fit your use case.

Metadata migration

Use metadata migration if:

• You need to migrate while mitigating breaking changes between the source and target clusters, such as differences in mappings, settings, aliases, or component templates.
• You want a relatively consistent configuration between the source and target clusters.

Backfill migration

Use backfill migration if:

• You need to move historical data without disrupting live traffic.
• You want to backfill indexes from a specific point in time without impacting the source cluster.
• You want to verify historical data in the target cluster before switching over.
• You want to backfill using an existing or incremental snapshot.
• You need the fastest backfill option that includes reindexing.
• You want the ability to pause and resume migration.

RFS

Use RFS if:

• You already use OpenSearch snapshots for backups.
• You need to migrate documents at scale in parallel, such as with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS).
• You require a data migration path as part of a zero-downtime migration.
• Your AWS Region supports RFS and your shard sizes are within supported limits.

Combination of all three

Use a combination of all three migration types if:

• You’re performing a complex, multi-version migration.
• You require zero downtime and full validation of the target environment.
• You want end-to-end tooling for metadata, data movement, and cluster behavior comparison.
• You’re cloning an existing cluster and changing the source’s configuration.
• You’re setting up disaster recovery.

Checklist

Use this checklist to decide whether Migration Assistant is right for you:

• Are you migrating across one or more major versions?

• Do you need to maintain service availability with zero downtime?

• Do you need to validate a new OpenSearch cluster before switching over?

• Is your environment self-managed or running on Amazon OpenSearch Service?

• Are you looking for tooling that can automate metadata migration and performance comparison?

If you answered “yes” to most of these questions, Migration Assistant is likely the right solution for your migration.