Case study
Oil and Gas Producer Moves Observability Platform to Elastic Cloud With Minimal Downtime
How SquareShift planned a four-day move of a 1.3 TB on-premises Elasticsearch cluster to Elastic Cloud on Azure, with a three-hour downtime target.
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Client
An energy producer that ran a single three-node on-premises Elasticsearch cluster holding about 1.3 TB of data.
Industry
Energy (Oil & Gas)
Services
Stack
Elasticsearch · Elastic Cloud · Kibana · Microsoft Azure · Azure Blob Storage
How SquareShift delivered it.
Project Context
The client wanted to move from on-premises Elasticsearch to Elastic Cloud on Azure. SquareShift planned a four-day migration to preserve dashboards, indices, lifecycle policies and aliases with minimal downtime.
Project Objectives
Move to Elastic Cloud on Azure.
Limit downtime to three hours, preserve all features, support future scaling.
Challenges
Snapshot restores failed because the Azure container had insufficient permissions.
Writes had to stop during the snapshot, within a three-hour downtime window.
The target version, 8.13.2, did not appear in the Elastic Cloud drop-down. The Elastic team updated version visibility, and the move went ahead through the API.
Solution Delivery
SquareShift planned a three-hour maintenance window, validated Elastic Cloud capacity and version, then took a final on-premises snapshot.
Fixed Azure Blob permissions and proved restores with test snapshots.
Restored the snapshot into Elastic Cloud and switched application endpoints over.
Re-enabled writes and lifecycle policies, then validated dashboards and searches.
Set production snapshot policies and froze the old cluster.
Outcome
1.3 TB of data moved to Elastic Cloud in a four-day engagement. The cutover plan set a downtime target of three hours or less.
A snapshot restore that has never been tested is not a backup. Prove it with test snapshots before the cutover window.
Senior Consultant, SquareShift