Multi-Cloud support for the OpenSearch Migration Assistant

If you're running Elasticsearch today, whether on elastic.co or self-managed, and you've been looking at migrating to OpenSearch, there's been a missing piece for organizations running it on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP): a clean, supported path to get there. We've been working to fix that.

Aiven has contributed full GCP support to the OpenSearch Migration Assistant, the open source Kubernetes-native toolset for migrating Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and Apache Solr workloads to OpenSearch. This includes private networking support, which teams in financial services, healthcare, and other regulated industries need before they can even consider a migration path.

What is the OpenSearch Migration Assistant?

The Migration Assistant is an important tool in the OpenSearch ecosystem. It handles the hard parts of migrating to OpenSearch: metadata migration, index mapping, live traffic capture and replay, and comparison tooling so you can validate your target cluster before cutting over.

It supports Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and Apache Solr as source systems, managed or self-managed, with OpenSearch as the target, managed or self-managed.

Before Aiven's contributions, the Migration Assistant was an AWS-only solution. It worked well if your target was AWS, but there was no supported path for any other cloud.

What Aiven contributed

In late April of 2026 we published an RFC with our proposal to extend the Migration Assistant to support cloud-agnostic deployments by making some targeted code changes and introducing Terraform. The response from the community was very positive. Kris Freedain, the OpenSearch Senior Community Manager and Ambassador, was particularly helpful by supporting our first PR on the OpenSearch Slack workspace and also on LinkedIn.

Terraform, the industry standard for infrastructure as code, is what makes our multi-cloud support possible. Our five merged PRs add GCP as a supported cloud provider for the migration infrastructure, alongside the existing AWS support. The Migration Assistant now works across both clouds, with more providers planned.

Full GCP deployment support. The Migration Assistant now has a supported deployment path on GCP, running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Builders on GCP get the same tooling and workflow that was previously only available on AWS. No more workarounds.

Private networking for regulated industries. Organizations in financial services, healthcare, and government typically can't route migration traffic over the public internet. Our contributions add private networking support, so the migration path stays entirely within a private network boundary.

The Terraform approach has gotten traction with the project maintainers too. Aiven plans to contribute AWS support via Terraform next.

The OpenSearch Migration Assistant Software Architecture

Why this matters for Aiven customers

For Aiven, this contribution opens a real migration path.

If you're running Elasticsearch on GCP today, whether on elastic.co or self-managed, you now have a clear, tooling-backed route to move those workloads to Aiven for OpenSearch. The Migration Assistant handles the heavy lifting: capturing live traffic, replaying it against your target cluster, migrating your index metadata, and giving you confidence before you flip the switch.

And because we've added private networking support, that path is available to organizations that couldn't have used it before. If your security posture requires traffic to stay off the public internet, you can still run a full migration.

If you're already running OpenSearch, whether self-managed or on a managed service, that same migration path is open to you. And if reducing operational overhead is part of the goal, Aiven for OpenSearch offers a fully managed migration target.

Aiven for OpenSearch gives you a fully managed, open source based service across AWS, GCP, and Azure. You get the full OpenSearch ecosystem (dashboards, security, alerting) without managing the infrastructure yourself. The Migration Assistant takes the risk out of getting there.

Get started

The GCP support and private networking contributions are available in the opensearch-project/opensearch-migrations repository. Updates to the public documentation are pending.

If you're evaluating a move from Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, or Apache Solr to OpenSearch on GCP, try Aiven for OpenSearch free or talk to our team about what a migration looks like for your organization.