Elastic upgrade hosted on GCP

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hi there,
I am pretty new to Elasticsearch and I ran into an Upgrade task that gave me some doubts.
I have a 3-nodes Cluster running Elasticsearch on Google Cloud (as a Google Click to Deploy deployment) ad I must upgrade my stack which currently is a 5.6.8 to the latest 7.6.2.
I suppose my biggest problem is reindexing, since it seems to be my only valuable data on the cluster.
I was scouting on elastic.co documentation and I was wondering which was the best way to upgrande and reindex between :
a) Upgrade to 6.8, install Kibana and run Kibana Agest to automatically reindex to 7.6.2, upgrade then to 7.6.2
b) Set up a new 7.6.2 cluster and just reindex from remote

I was going with option b) but I have some doubts since I read that the reindex operation is manual and I have 200+ indexes with 1000+ documents and it scared me a little.
If there are other alternatives I am open to discussion :wink:
Thanks in advance

2

Either will work, it's what you are comfy with that is important.

That's a really high index to document ratio. You may want to revisit that approach and merge some of these with a reindex?

3

Ok Thanks.
When reindexing from remote, is there a way to do it automatically or do I have to make a single API call for each index I want to restore?
I am referring to https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/7.6/reindex-upgrade-remote.html as a guide.

4

You can use wildcards, but yes, at the moment it's manual. You could do some simple scripting to automate each call though.

5

That's what I thought thanks.
After reindexing I expect to have all my old indices and documents back where I left them, with a newer version of ES right? I suppose i shouldn't worry about restoring some indices from a backup after that.

6

You should have a backup anyway, it's good habit and risk mitigation.
But yes, pending any problems that may crop up, that's the goal :slight_smile:

7

Yes sure. I was asking because I already have a backup and I tried to restore it from Google Cloud Storage( with the repository-gcs plugin) after doing an upgrade to a single node from 5.6 to 6.8 but I noticed that a lot of indices where missing even if the process got no error. I guess this is due to the fact that the different versions of ES require a reindex before upgrading, am I right?

8

Some versions do, yes. Reindex before upgrading | Elasticsearch Guide [7.6] | Elastic has more on that.

9

Is there a way to remove a backed up index manually from the repo? I did a snapshot on GCS but I can't find the index with the id I have, I don't understand how indices are backed up on Google Cloud Storage.
Thanks in advance

10

You would need to delete the snapshot itself, manually removing files is likely to cause other issues.

11

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