Upgrade to Elasticsearch 7.x

If you have a cluster and want to upgrade to version 7.x, there are a few things you must do to prepare for the upgrade. Preparing for your upgrade ahead of time ensures that you can enjoy the new features and improved usability of Elasticsearch 7.x as quickly as possible.

Elasticsearch Service upgrades differ from your on-premise installation because all major configuration changes for Elasticsearch, Kibana, and the security features are handled for you.

When you upgrade, Elasticsearch Service automatically runs the deprecation API to retrieve information about the cluster, node, and index-level settings that need to be removed or changed. If there are any deprecation issues that would prevent the upgraded deployment from successfully performing, the upgrade fails. To resolve the deprecation issues, use the Upgrade Assistant in Kibana.

If your cluster does not include a Kibana instance yet, you can enable Kibana first, then use the Upgrade Assistant. After you resolve the deprecation issues, try the upgrade again.

For more information, refer to:

To keep your data safe, Elasticsearch Service takes a snapshot before making any changes to your cluster. After a major version upgrade is complete, and the first successful snapshot with the new major version is available, the snapshot taken with the previous version of Elasticsearch is either stored in your snapshot repository or listed under snapshots.

For example, before upgrading from Elasticsearch version 6.7 to version 7.x, a snapshot is taken. After the upgrade to version 7.x is complete, and a first snapshot with the new version is available, snapshots taken with version 6.7 is listed under snapshots.

Elasticsearch 7.x is compatible with indices created in version 6.0 or later. If you have indices from version 5.x or earlier, you must remove or reindex them before you upgrade.

Major version upgrades can include changes that expose the upgrading process to possible risk. A breaking change is the result of a functional change between major Elasticsearch versions, and requires you to perform additional steps to ensure that you can use the new version as intended.

For more information, refer to Breaking changes in 7.17.

The following known issues apply to the Elastic Stack 7.x releases:

When you upgrade from version 6.7 to 7.0, you must first log in to Kibana to make sure that your upgrade is successful.

During the upgrade process, you are prompted to update the security realm settings when your user_settings include a xpack.security.authc.realms value.

There are two settings that prompt you to update:

To modify the user_settings:

In Elasticsearch version 7.0 and later, the security features to keep your Elasticsearch Service deployments safe are now referred to simply as security features instead of X-Pack.

For information about the security features in Elasticsearch version 7.0 and earlier, refer to Securing your deployment.