Introducing the Amazon OpenSearch Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework

Earlier this year, we released the Amazon OpenSearch Service Lens, an AWS Well-Architected whitepaper. The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a consistent approach for evaluating architectures and implementing scalable designs. Using this framework, the Amazon OpenSearch Service Lens outlines how to perform AWS Well-Architected reviews to assess and identify technical risks in your OpenSearch Service deployments.

In this post, we show you how to use the Amazon OpenSearch Service Lens to evaluate your OpenSearch Service workloads against architectural best practices.

Understanding the AWS Well-Architected Framework

At AWS, a well-architected cloud environment is fundamental to helping you achieve your business outcomes. The AWS Well-Architected Framework represents the collective experience of AWS from working with organizations across industries, distilled into a structured approach for evaluating architectures and implementing designs that scale over time. The AWS Well-Architected Framework is built on six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. Using the Framework, cloud architects, system builders, engineers, and developers can build secure, high performance, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads.

OpenSearch Service Lens

The OpenSearch Service Lens is a collection of customer-proven design principles and best practices to help you adopt a cloud-native approach to using Amazon OpenSearch Service. These recommendations are based on insights that AWS has gathered from customers, AWS Partners, the community, and our own AWS OpenSearch technical specialist communities.

The OpenSearch Service Lens extends the AWS Well-Architected Framework to help you address critical architectural questions specific to Amazon OpenSearch workloads, for example:

• How do you size and configure Amazon OpenSearch Service domains for optimal performance?
• What data retention and lifecycle management strategies help balance cost and accessibility?
• How do you implement security controls that protect sensitive data while maintaining search functionality?
• What operational practices ensure reliable search experiences as your data volumes grow?

The OpenSearch Service Lens joins a collection of AWS Well-Architected Lenses that focus on specialized workloads such as the Internet of Things (IoT), games, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), SAP, and serverless technology.

The lens highlights some of the most common areas for assessment and improvement. It is designed to align with and provide insights across the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework:

• Operational excellence focuses on running and monitoring systems to deliver business value, and continually improving processes and procedures. This topic includes the ability to support development and run workloads effectively, gaining insights into their operations, and continuously improve supporting processes to deliver business value.
• Security focuses on protecting your data and systems. This addresses implementing fine-grained access control for users and applications, securing domain access through encryption and network controls, detecting and mitigating vulnerabilities, reducing potential attack surfaces, and protecting sensitive data.
• Reliability focuses on ensuring an end user environment performs correctly and consistently when it’s expected to. This topic includes implementing automatic disaster recovery mechanisms, designing multi-Availability Zone deployments for high availability, scaling domain capacity to meet demand, and using automation for operational tasks to reduce human error. It also covers implementing backup and restore strategies, managing cluster state, and setting up monitoring and alerting to maintain service performance and availability.
• Performance efficiency focuses on using Amazon OpenSearch Service resources effectively. This includes selecting appropriate instance types and storage options based on your workload requirements, implementing performance monitoring and optimization strategies, and using OpenSearch Service features to reduce operational overhead. It also covers tuning domain configurations, managing data indexing patterns, and optimizing search and analytics queries to achieve the best possible performance while maintaining cost efficiency.
• Cost optimization focuses on managing expenses effectively. This topic addresses implementing cost allocation tags to track domain expenses by workload, selecting appropriate instance types and storage options based on your needs, and choosing cost-effective payment options such as Reserved Instances for predictable workloads. It also covers using UltraWarm and cold storage tiers for infrequently accessed data, implementing index lifecycle policies to manage storage costs, and monitoring usage patterns to rightsize domains and optimize performance-to-cost ratios.
• Sustainability focuses on minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads. OpenSearch topics addresses implementing efficient domain sizing strategies, selecting instance types with the best performance-to-energy ratio, optimizing retention policies and using different storage tiers to reduce the active compute footprint.

By applying this lens to your Amazon OpenSearch Service workloads, you gain insights that go beyond general architectural principles to address characteristics of search and analytics implementations. The OpenSearch Service Lens provides a consistent framework for making architectural decisions aligned with AWS best practices for designing a new Amazon OpenSearch Service architecture or optimizing an existing deployment.

Getting started with the OpenSearch Lens

To get started with the Amazon OpenSearch Service Lens, review the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability.

Then, sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Well-Architected Tool. Navigate to Custom Lenses and import the Amazon OpenSearch Service Lens. After importing the lens, you can use the specialized questionnaires to evaluate your OpenSearch Service workloads against best practices, and once you complete the questionnaire, you will get insightful feedback.

Next, plan architecture reviews with your team to evaluate your Amazon OpenSearch Service domains using the lens criteria. Document your assessment results, including what works well and where you can improve your deployment. For help understanding the Amazon OpenSearch Service Lens questions, refer to the lens documentation.

If you have an AWS Support plan, you can request help with your architecture review. The OpenSearch Service Lens questions aim to guide your architectural decisions, not test your knowledge. Focus on understanding the architectural principles behind each question. After completing your assessment, create a prioritized improvement plan that addresses findings that could affect your workload performance, data durability, and cost efficiency. For help implementing these improvements, you can work with AWS Professional Services or AWS Partners who specialize in Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Conclusion and next steps

The Amazon OpenSearch Service Lens provides actionable guidance to help you build well-architected search and analytics workloads aligned with your business requirements. Start by accessing the AWS Well-Architected Tool and applying this lens to your OpenSearch Service domains. Make architectural reviews a regular part of your development process. Consider sharing your experiences with the AWS community to help others improve their OpenSearch Service implementations.

You can find more information on AWS Well-Architected Lenses in the AWS Well-Architected Tool User Guide. We encourage you to incorporate this specialized guidance into your architectural reviews and use it to drive continuous improvement in your search and analytics workloads on AWS.

AWS regularly updates the Amazon OpenSearch Service Lens to reflect new service capabilities and architectural best practices. These updates help you take advantage of the latest improvements in Amazon OpenSearch Service while maintaining architectural excellence.

To learn more about Amazon OpenSearch Service, including customer success stories and additional resources, visit Amazon OpenSearch Service page.

About the authors

Contributors

The authors would like to thank the following people for their invaluable help in developing this new OpenSearch Lens for the AWS Well-Architected Framework: Muslim Abu-Taha, Senior Worldwide Specialist Solutions Architect for Amazon OpenSearch; Shih-Yong Wang, Manager, Solutions Architecture; Ankush Agarwal, Solutions Architect; and Jun-Tin Yeh, Cloud Optimization Success Solutions Architect.

The authors would also like to thank the following people for their contributions to technical reviews: Cedric Pelvet, Principal OpenSearch Solutions Architect; Hajer Bouafif, Senior OpenSearch Solutions Architect; Francisco Losada, OpenSearch Solutions Architect; Bharav Patel, OpenSearch Solutions Architect; and Praveen Prasad, Senior Specialist Technical Account Manager.