How Akamai moved off proprietary licensing to OpenSearch, cut costs, and reached zero Severity 1 incidents while ingesting more than 3TB of data every day.
Summary
Akamai manages a complex environment processing over 3TB of data every day. To scale its analytics infrastructure and remove reliance on proprietary licensing, the engineering team migrated from basic Elasticsearch to OpenSearch to avoid licensing issues while gaining access to built-in enterprise features like searchable snapshots and SSO. By partnering with BigData Boutique, an OpenSearch Software Foundation Member and accredited OpenSearch support provider for enterprise-support, proactive monitoring and expert operational guidance, the team achieved a record of zero Severity 1 (Sev 1) incidents since 2024.
The challenge
Why did Akamai migrate from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch?
Akamai Technologies, a global cloud computing, cybersecurity, and content delivery network (CDN), operates a high-performance Kubernetes environment for customer-facing analytics and internal troubleshooting. Managing this infrastructure at scale presented three distinct challenges:
- Licensing Constraints: Rising costs and restrictive licensing from their previous vendor necessitated a change.
- Operational Burden: The engineering team needed to maintain 99.9% reliability without ballooning the operational overhead of their seven-person SRE team.
- Preventative Oversight: The team required a mechanism to identify potential issues before they escalated into critical service outages.
The solution
How did OpenSearch lower costs and give Akamai more control?
Akamai selected OpenSearch to replace Elasticsearch. This migration provided a path to long-term sustainability for several reasons:
- Cost Efficiency: Transitioning away from paid licenses significantly lowered the total cost of ownership. OpenSearch’s Apache 2.0 licensing and vendor-neutral governance gave Akamai greater deployment and support flexibility.
- Architectural Familiarity: Because the platform remains built on a foundation compatible with their previous workflows, the team preserved key features while gaining control over their infrastructure.
- Community-Driven Innovation: The open source nature of the platform ensures the team avoids vendor lock-in and retains the ability to scale their operations as data ingestion requirements grow.
“We migrated to OpenSearch as a sustainable alternative to proprietary licensing. It allowed us to reduce costs significantly while maintaining the high performance our platform requires.” -Nazrana Alam, Akamai Technologies
The results
How did OpenSearch and NeverBlink AI improve cluster stability?
While the infrastructure was powerful, Akamai needed deep OpenSearch expertise on demand without building a larger in-house specialist team. The integration of NeverBlink AI transformed their operational workflow:
- Proactive Alerting and Preventive Monitoring: NeverBlink continuously analyzes cluster health and generates actionable alerts, allowing engineers to address issues before they impact customers.
- Expert Guidance: The expert support team provides strategic support for complex architectural decisions, including Cross-Cluster Replication (CCR).
- Rapid Deployment: The team deployed the NeverBlink agent in a matter of minutes, gaining immediate visibility into their metrics and cluster performance.
How did Akamai reach zero Severity 1 incidents?
The partnership has yielded quantifiable improvements in operational stability and incident management:
- Zero Sev 1 Incidents: Since the beginning of the engagement, Akamai has reported zero Severity 1 escalations. This marks a substantial improvement compared to the history with their previous vendor.
- Scalable Throughput: The OpenSearch platform successfully handles more than 3TB of data ingestion daily across production clusters.
- Faster Resolution: Actionable recommendations included within NeverBlink alerts allow the SRE team to resolve potential bottlenecks in minutes rather than hours.
Why it matters
Akamai’s experience shows a repeatable pattern for teams running search and analytics at scale: moving to OpenSearch removes proprietary licensing costs and lock-in, while a vendor-neutral, Apache 2.0-licensed platform preserves the enterprise features large deployments depend on. Paired with proactive monitoring and expert support, the same approach can help lean SRE teams hold high reliability targets without expanding headcount.
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BigData Boutique is a big data consultancy specialising in search, analytics, and data engineering. As a member of the OpenSearch Software Foundation and an accredited long-term support provider for OpenSearch, BigData Boutique contributes to the OpenSearch ecosystem and provides implementation, optimization, and support services for organizations building on OpenSearch.
Learn more at bigdataboutique.com
