A 40+ Year Old American Commercial Bank Upgrades Its Critical Clusters from Elasticsearch 7.17 to 8.x
Client
The client is a large, 40+ year old American commercial bank with a global footprint. It handles over $1 billion in annual revenue and manages critical banking infrastructure and transactions across APAC, Europe, the Middle East, and North America.
Project Context
The client was using on-prem infrastructure to manage critical search workloads tied to customer transactions. They were using Ansible playbooks to manage their Elasticsearch cluster on version 7.17, but since Ansible support stopped at that version, they couldn’t continue the upgrade to 8.x without expert support.
Challenges
- Limited in-house expertise with Elasticsearch and Ansible
- No native Ansible support for 8.x upgrades
- Required support to evaluate Terraform and ECK tooling
- Security compliance and vulnerability mitigation were essential
Solution
- Used Elasticsearch and Ansible with guidance from SquareShift to create custom playbooks for 8.x
- Provided evaluation and support for Terraform and ECK as long-term options
- Designed a secure, phased upgrade path for 7.17 to 8.x
Project Objectives
- Upgrade Elasticsearch clusters from 7.17 to 8.x
- Ensure upgrade aligns with baseline security and eliminates known vulnerabilities
- Provide expert guidance on Terraform and ECK (Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes)
Solution Delivery
- SquareShift enabled the client to create Ansible playbooks compatible with Elasticsearch 8.x
- Helped perform baseline security assessments and patch known vulnerabilities
- Provided hands-on guidance to evaluate Terraform and Elastic’s Kubernetes Operator (ECK)
- Supported the transition planning from Ansible to modern orchestration options
Testimonial
Thanks to SquareShift’s support, we achieved a secure and seamless upgrade while preparing our systems for the future
