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This talk shares a hands-on journey of building and operating a large-scale OpenSearch platform in a strictly on-premises, VM-based environment. What started as an urgent Splunk replacement evolved into a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) logging platform for high ingestion rates (~40GB to 1.2TB/day per customer).
The session focuses on real operational challenges and experiences: sizing and sharding decisions, gaps in official documentation, and the realities of owning OpenSearch end-to-end. Initially using Terraform to deploy and manual bootstrapping.
The talk includes a migration failure story from our biggest cluster, caused by accidental double ingestion, bad sizing and snapshot-induced OOMs.
At the end we have automated deployments, bootstrapping, ISM, snapshots, tiering, SSO-based access control, searchable-snapshots(on-prem S3) and automation. Due to limitations in ISM we built a custom lifecycle automation script via an operator-like pipeline and an opensearchcli binary.
Attendees gain a realistic view of running OpenSearch at scale on-prem, including lessons learned the hard way.