AWS Well-Architected design considerations

This solution uses the best practices from the AWS Well-Architected Framework, which helps customers design and operate reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective workloads in the cloud.

This section describes how the design principles and best practices of the Well-Architected Framework benefit this solution.

Operational excellence

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the operational excellence pillar.

• The solution enables users to transition from legacy, self-managed OpenSearch and OpenSearch clusters to AWS OpenSearch, a managed service that significantly reduces the operational burden associated with maintaining outdated systems.

Security

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the security pillar.

• The solution facilitates user migration to Amazon OpenSearch Service, which is regularly updated to uphold a strong security posture.

Reliability

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the reliability pillar.

• The solution introduces a lightweight proxy layer between the client and the source cluster to capture data reliably using Kafka. This ensures that requests can be replayed on the target cluster, with the flexibility to modify or resend any failed requests.

Performance efficiency

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the performance efficiency pillar.

• The tools within the solution have been optimized for efficiently capturing and replaying traffic, mitigating the need for horizontal scaling.

Cost optimization

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the cost optimization pillar.

• The solution provisions CloudFormation stacks designed to operate specifically during migration processes, which can be safely decommissioned post-migration.

• The solution operates on AWS Fargate within Elastic Container Service, ensuring cost-effectiveness as charges are incurred only for the duration that the containers are active.

• For those interested in a preliminary local trial, a local version of the solution can be built and deployed in a user’s own environment before cloud implementation. Detailed instructions and resources for this are available at the OpenSearch Migrations GitHub repository: https://github.com/opensearch-project/opensearch-migrations.

Sustainability

This section describes how we architected this solution using the principles and best practices of the sustainability pillar.

• The solution allows customers to migrate their workloads to more environmentally friendly hardware, for example Graviton instance types.