### Module 8: Operational Best Practices #### Lesson 1: Routine Maintenance and Health Checks **Objective**: Teach participants how to conduct routine maintenance and health checks to ensure the optimal performance and stability of OpenSearch clusters. **Topics**: - **Maintenance Overview**: Importance of regular maintenance for the longevity and efficiency of OpenSearch clusters. - **Health Check Tools and Metrics**: Introduction to tools and metrics for monitoring cluster health, including CPU, memory usage, disk I/O, and node availability. - **Automating Health Checks**: How to automate health checks using scripts or cloud service features to regularly assess cluster status. - **Addressing Common Issues**: Strategies for identifying and resolving common issues detected during health checks, such as unbalanced shards, hardware failures, or configuration errors. #### Lesson 2: Upgrading and Migrating Clusters **Objective**: Provide a comprehensive guide on safely upgrading and migrating OpenSearch clusters to new versions or infrastructure with minimal downtime. **Topics**: - **Planning Upgrades**: Steps for planning an OpenSearch cluster upgrade, including compatibility checks and staging environment tests. - **Rolling Upgrades**: Detailed process for performing a rolling upgrade, minimizing downtime while updating nodes to a new version. - **Migration Strategies**: Options and best practices for migrating OpenSearch data to a new cluster or cloud environment, including snapshot and restore techniques. - **Post-Upgrade/Migration Tasks**: Validation tests to ensure the cluster operates as expected after an upgrade or migration. #### Lesson 3: Cost Management and Optimization **Objective**: Explore strategies for managing and optimizing the costs associated with running OpenSearch clusters, without sacrificing performance. **Topics**: - **Cost Analysis**: Understanding the cost components of running an OpenSearch cluster, including compute, storage, and data transfer expenses. - **Optimization Techniques**: Practical tips for reducing costs, such as rightsizing instances, leveraging reserved instances or savings plans, and optimizing storage and indexing strategies. - **Monitoring and Alerting for Costs**: Setting up monitoring for cost-related metrics and configuring alerts to prevent cost overruns. - **Cost vs. Performance Trade-offs**: Balancing cost optimization efforts with performance requirements, ensuring that cost-saving measures do not negatively impact cluster efficiency or availability.