Elastic Cloud Enterprise Platform Modernization for a Global Financial Services Firm
Client
The Client is a leading global financial services & banking group modernizing its Elastic Cloud Enterprise platform and underlying infrastructure
across its production estate.
Project Context
The project successfully modernized the entire Elastic Cloud Enterprise estate while re-platforming the underlying infrastructure from RHEL 7 / Docker to RHEL 8 / Podman across 20 production hosts with zero data loss, no unplanned downtime, and zero service interruption. Additionally, it advanced the ECE control plane along a safe, staged path and upgraded every managed customer deployment from Stack 7.17.5 to 8.x
Project Objectives
- Upgrade the ECE control plane from 3.1 to 4.0.x through a validated, version-by-version staging path.
- Re-platform all 20 hosts to RHEL 8 / Podman role by role, keeping the platform continuously available.
- Upgrade 100% of managed deployments to Elastic Stack 8.x ahead of the ECE 4.0 hard gate.
- Retire all legacy RHEL 7 infrastructure and validate the modernized end state.
Challenges
- Operating on outdated RHEL 7 and Docker environments that required urgent retirement and modernization.
- An outdated ECE 3.1 control plane requiring a restrictive, multi-stage version migration path.
- Customer deployments stuck on Elastic Stack 7.17.5, blocking the mandatory ECE 4.0 upgrade path.
- Modernizing live financial infrastructure under a strict mandate of zero data loss and no downtime.
Solution
- DR-First Sequencing: Each of the 8 phases opened with a platform secrets / config backup and verified system and customer snapshots before any change was made.
- Rolling, Non-Disruptive Migration: Hosts moved one at a time through ECE maintenance mode proxies, allocators, coordinators, and directors migrated role by role with health checks between each step.
- Quorum & Gate Integrity: Director migrations preserved ZooKeeper quorum throughout, and the program enforced full Stack 8.x coverage before triggering the ECE 4.0 upgrade.
- Validate at Every Step: Every phase closed with a Cloud UI health check before the next phase was allowed to begin.
