As part of our partnership with Elastic, IBM is announcing the release of a new version of IBM Cloud Databases for Elasticsearch. We are excited to bring you an enhanced offering of our enterprise-ready, fully managed Elasticsearch. Our partnership with Elastic means that we will be able to offer more, richer functionality and world-class levels of support.

The release of version 7.17 of our managed database service will include support for additional functionality, including things like Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Index Lifecycle Management (ILM).

Please read this announcement carefully as it contains important information regarding pricing and version lifecycle management.

End of Life for versions 7.9 and 7.10

There is action required before November 30, 2023, for your Elasticsearch version 7.9 and 7.10 deployments. On November 30, these versions will be End Of Life.

We strongly recommend that you upgrade your database deployments to version 7.17 before that date. Our recommended procedure for this is restoring from a backup, as detailed here.

Using this method will give you control of the timing and execution of your upgrade and will guarantee the integrity of your data. You will also be able to ensure that any of the breaking changes between versions detailed by Elastic (see here) do not affect your application(s).

After November 30, 2023, deployments of IBM Cloud Databases for Elasticsearch on versions 7.9 and 7.10 (the IBM Cloud Databases for Elasticsearch Standard Plan) that are still active will be forcibly upgraded to version 7.17 (the IBM Cloud Databases for Elasticsearch Enterprise Plan).

We do not recommend that you wait until then for the following reasons:

• We provide no SLAs for this type of forced migration.
• You may experience some data loss.
• Your application may experience downtime.
• Your application may stop working if it has any incompatibilities with the new version (see above about breaking changes between versions).
• You cannot control the timing of when this upgrade will happen for your deployment.
• There is no rollback process for this forced upgrade.

Pricing changes

The cost of IBM Cloud Databases for Elasticsearch deployments is increasing. All new deployments of Elasticsearch version 7.17 (the Enterprise Plan) will be charged at the new list price.

To give customers an opportunity to upgrade and take advantage of the new service features, we are holding the prices of versions 7.9 and 7.10 (the Standard Plan) at existing prices until June 30, 2023. From July 1, 2023, all deployments of Elasticsearch will be charged at the new prices, without exception.

As mentioned in the previous section, our recommendation is that you upgrade as soon as possible to ensure a stable upgrade while making full use of the service improvements.

Learn more

If you have any questions about your Elasticsearch deployments, please visit our documentation or open a support ticket.