Breaking Changes Remediation for Elasticsearch to OpenSearch Migrations

[sumobrian]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

When migrating from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch, users often encounter breaking changes that disrupt the migration process. These changes can involve differences in APIs, settings, mappings, and query behavior. Users face difficulties in identifying, addressing, and validating these changes, leading to migration failures or unexpected behavior in OpenSearch.

What solution would you like?

Introduce a "Breaking Changes Remediation" feature within OpenSearch Migrations that helps users identify, address, and validate breaking changes when migrating from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch. This feature should include:

• Automated Detection of Breaking Changes: Perform a pre-migration analysis of the source Elasticsearch cluster to detect potential incompatibilities. This analysis should list all incompatible APIs, index mappings, and configuration changes that need remediation.
• Automated Transformations and Fixes: Offer automated adjustments to configurations, mappings, and settings to align with OpenSearch standards. This could include creating new index templates or modifying existing ones to fit OpenSearch requirements.
• Simulated Migration Environment: Allow users to simulate their migration in a sandbox environment to validate and test the changes before applying them to production.
• Behavioral Comparison: Compare key operational behaviors between the source and target clusters, focusing on query execution, index operations, and other critical tasks. This will help users understand the impact of breaking changes on their specific use cases.
• Guided Workflow with Step-by-Step Remediation Recommendations: Provide an interactive workflow with clear descriptions of detected issues, recommended solutions, and actionable steps to resolve each breaking change.

What alternatives have you considered?

1. Manual Analysis and Remediation: Users can manually review changelogs and release notes to identify potential breaking changes, but this is error-prone and time-consuming, especially for large-scale migrations.
2. Post-Migration Issue Resolution: Addressing issues only after the migration is complete, which can lead to downtime, performance issues, and unexpected behavior in the target OpenSearch cluster.

Do you have any additional context?

This feature would be especially valuable for users migrating from Elasticsearch versions where breaking changes are known to cause disruptions in OpenSearch. By automating the detection and remediation of these changes, this feature would significantly reduce the risk of migration failures and improve overall user confidence. For instance, integrating this feature into an existing dashboard could offer users a unified view of migration tasks, potential breaking changes, and real-time validation metrics.