Elasticsearch 5.x is here!

The long wait is over! We have been successfully running ES 5.x on production clusters for a couple of months now, and are comfortable with the many performance improvements in this iteration. That’s why we have updated 5.x to be the new default version for new clusters.
Moving from 2.x to 5.x
5.x comes with some new features and breaking changes. It’s always a good idea to read the docs, but if you want to save time you can run our migration checker against your cluster in Bonsai by navigating to the dashboard and running the migration tests:

This will run a battery of tests against your settings and mappings, alerting you if you have anything that will break if you were to reindex your current settings and data into a 5.x cluster.

If you have any red alerts (this example doesn’t — woot!), you can direct your attention to only the docs you need instead of searching for breaking changes yourself.

How to Move to 5.x on Bonsai
In order to upgrade an existing cluster, all cluster data will need to be cleared because of backwards incompatibility. Check out our docs here for more details on upgrading major versions.
If there are active shards the upgrade button will be disabled, but once the cluster is clear you can click the button to upgrade:

Current Supported Versions
Bonsai supports 5.1 and 5.3, and we’ll be releasing 5.4 soon. By default, new clusters will be provisioned on 5.4, however you can still choose to provision clusters on 2.4 and 1.7.
Selecting a Version in the Bonsai App
While creating a cluster directly through our Bonsai app, you can choose from the available versions under the version section:

Selecting a Version via Heroku
Heroku customers provisioning a cluster through the Bonsai add-on can use the version flag when creating the cluster:
heroku addons:create bonsai:[plan] [-a APP_NAME] [--version=X.Y]The version parameter also works in your app.json if you use PR apps and Heroku pipelines.
Find us at info@bonsai.io for help and questions, and happy searching!

