Upgraded Elasticsearch from 7.15 to 8.2

Typically we do big upgrades for infrastructure software (e.g., Elasticsearch, Postgres, Ubuntu, Django…) once every 18 months ~ 24 months or so.

We upgraded Elasticsearch from 7.6 to 7.15 last November. We shouldn’t have updated to a new version now (~7 months). However, this time is different -

• ansible-elasticsearch won’t support newer version of Elasticsearch (i.e., 8.0+) any more. This means that we have to rewrite our Ansible provision scripts next time when we’ll upgrade to a newer version of Elasticsearch. Based on our experience, we’d better rewrite the provision scripts sooner rather than later, otherwise, it may become a disaster if there’s an outage, AND we have to rewrite the provision scripts, AND re-provision our Elasticsearch cluster at the same time.
• New features of 8.0+ look appealing! We (as a service provider) want to be like good chefs, who always use the best ingredients to cook & serve our customers :)

So, we rewrote our Ansible provision scripts for Elasticsearch, and re-provisioned our Elasticsearch cluster (upgraded from 7.15 to 8.2).