Chef Blogs

Chef Automate is Moving to OpenSearch

Karunesh Kumar | Posted on | Chef Automate

Chef Automate provides a single interactive dashboard to track and analyze infrastructure automation metrics within heterogeneous IT fleets. Currently, Chef Automate uses Elasticsearch as its database. However, as of Apr’22 Chef Automate will be moving to OpenSearch 1.2.4 as Elasticsearch, announced an end-of-life (EOL) in February 2022. Chef Automate will soon be releasing a major update that will allow users to upgrade from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch.

Why are we doing this?

Elasticsearch announced the end of life of its version 6.8.23 which is currently used in Chef Automate. Elasticsearch is moving from Apache 2.0-licensed source code to the Elastic License. This license change was announced in version 7.11+, which does not entirely support the open-source and packaged distribution of Elasticsearch in Chef Automate. Hence, the decision to replace Elasticsearch with OpenSearch was necessary.

Who will be impacted?

Although there will be no impact on existing users with Chef Automate current versions, we strongly recommend all Chef Automate users to manually upgrade to version 4.x. Support and bug fixes will be available for version 4.x and above once 4.0 is released.

How do I get this new version?

Chef Automate’s major version upgrade that includes OpenSearch will be available for download to all users. To upgrade, users will have to perform a manual run of the upgrade command with a major flag, as shown below:

$ sudo chef-automate upgrade run --major

Other necessary steps will be available as prompts during the upgrade process. Detailed steps regarding upgrade and OpenSearch data migration can be accessed from the release notes accompanying the version update.

Since third party contracts and data persistence layers have also changed.  Auto-upgrade is not safe or recommended for customers using Chef Automate in production. We advise all users to upgrade manually to avoid complications during major updates.

When will it be available?

Open Search support for Chef Automate will be available by May 2022 (revised from April 2022), with new embedded OpenSearch 1.2.4 database migration.

Questions?

Please reach out to us on our Community Slack channel, #automate2_0.

Enterprise Customers can reach out to their respective Customer Architects or Support Team.