ETA for Elasticsearch 7.0.0 support?

Feature Requests
1

I understand that for the normal point upgrades we just wait a matter of days to a couple weeks, and then Search Guard catches up with Elasticsearch.

How does this work when there is a new major version? I’ve been reading about the changes for 7.x and it’s different enough from the 6.5.4 we have in production that I downloaded the release candidate and picked out a machine for testing.

I would guess that the answer is similar to the timeframe for point upgrades, but I’m curious if there is anything that is done differently for such a major system change.

2

Usually it takes no longer than a week until a Search Guard version is released for a particular ES version. This mainly depends on whether we “just” need to publish a compatibility release, i.e. the latest Search Guard version for a new Elasticsearch version. Or if we combine the compatibility release with a new Search Guard release that also contains fixes and new features.

For example, we will release Search Guard 6.7.0-24.3 tomorrow. This release took a couple of days longer since we combined the compatibility release (from 6.6.2 to 6.7.0) with a new Search Guard release (from 24.2 to 24.3).

We are following the changes for 7.x closely and are working on a compatible SG version for RC1 which is in the QA stage at the moment. The main differences between a point release and a major release are

  • introduction of breaking changes
  • upgrade process

We usually do not introduce breaking changes for a point release. This means we maintain backward compatibility with previous releases whenever possible. A major release is the only point where we would introduce major changes and remove deprecated features.

We will then provide a step-by-step upgrade guide, see for example the guide for upgrading from 5.x to 6.x.:

https://docs.search-guard.com/latest/upgrading-5-6

Since we need to test the upgrade process thoroughly, a major release will usually take us 2-3 weeks.

Plus, judging from our experience, Elastic sometimes introduces major code changes “in the last minute”, which means additional efforts on our side.

3

“usually take us 2-3 weeks.”

It’s been 23 days since you posted that. I can start annoying you now. :slight_smile:

Any updates on an ETA?

Thanks!!

-brian

4

Well, we need 2-3 weeks after the official release of ES. The reason for this is that almost all the time the ES GA release contains additional changes that had not been included in any of the RCs. So since ES7 came out on 10th of April, we still have some days :wink: Joking aside, the SG beta for ES7 has been released last week:

At the moment the RC is in QA phase and will be out this week. It will contain all planned changes already. For the GA we need to do some additional “polishing”, especially around the changed config format and the docs. ETA is early next week.

5

Woo!

Thanks for the update!

Thanks also for keeping up with those ES nerds. :slight_smile:

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