This case study is based on an OpenSearchCon Europe 2026 presentation Scaling Welfare With Open Source: How NAV Migrated To Managed OpenSearch delivered by Hans Kristian Flaatten, Platform Engineer (NAV) and Dmitry Kan, Product Director, Search (Aiven)
Summary
The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) responsible for distributing 33% of Norway’s national budget, migrated its critical 400GB-per-day logging infrastructure from Elasticsearch to managed OpenSearch. Partnering with Aiven, this strategic infrastructure move ensured uninterrupted observability for 1,000 developers and millions of citizens while aligning with Norway’s open source strategy and cloud modernization goals.
The challenge
Public sector organizations increasingly face pressure to modernize infrastructure while maintaining sovereignty, transparency, and operational reliability.
The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV), operates one of Norway’s most critical public sector technology environments – administering critical unemployment benefits, pensions, disability payments, maternity leave, and healthcare-related services for approximately 5.5 million citizens. The agency distributes approximately one-third of the country’s national budget.
NAV’s centralized logging infrastructure processed roughly 400GB of daily logs, supporting more than 1,000 developers who depended on real-time observability to maintain and troubleshoot applications. Reliability and visibility across systems is non-negotiable. As scale and complexity outpaced existing systems, NAV faced a critical choice: modernize to meet ‘open source first’ governance goals or remain tethered to licensing models that no longer served their long-term mission.
Two major challenges pushed NAV toward a migration:
- Elasticsearch licensing changes were no longer aligned with NAV’s open source procurement and sourcing strategy.
- Internal teams wanted to reduce infrastructure maintenance overhead as part of a larger cloud modernization effort.
The stakes were high. Any disruption to logging and observability could affect operational visibility across systems tied to critical welfare services.
“NAV’s sourcing strategy has been formalized to say that we are open source first. That’s the long-term viability of the tools and the products that we are using; they should really also be open source and open standards.” – Hans Kristian Flaatten (NAV)
The execution
NAV partnered with Aiven, an OpenSearch Software Foundation member, to migrate from Elasticsearch to managed OpenSearch while maintaining uninterrupted service availability.
The migration strategy focused on minimizing operational risk through phased execution and compatibility testing. Rather than introducing a disruptive cutover, the teams designed the migration to run alongside existing infrastructure while validating integrations and workflows incrementally.
Key elements of the migration included:
- Moving observability workloads to managed OpenSearch infrastructure
- Aligning with NAV’s open source governance requirements
- Reducing operational complexity for platform engineering teams
- Supporting broader cloud migration initiatives
- Maintaining continuous access to logging systems during the transition
The project also required rapid troubleshooting under pressure. According to the presentation shared at OpenSearchCon Europe 2026, the team encountered a critical integration issue only days before Christmas but resolved it without interrupting services.
“If you want to try that new version of the software, you can fork your cluster, OpenSearch or otherwise, and change it, modify and test without affecting your production. So, no longer half a year stalling ‘on we need to upgrade’. You can actually do it on the fly.” – Dmitry Kan, Aiven
Results
NAV’s migration to OpenSearch delivered operational continuity at massive scale while helping NAV modernize its observability architecture, demonstrating that large-scale government systems can transition to managed OpenSearch environments without compromising uptime or developer productivity.
Key outcomes
- Successfully migrated 400GB of daily log ingestion to managed OpenSearch
- Maintained uninterrupted service availability during migration
- Supported observability needs for more than 1,000 developers
- Reduced infrastructure management burden for internal platform teams
- Advanced NAV’s broader cloud modernization goals
- Preserved alignment with organizational open source policies
For NAV, the migration was not just a tooling decision. It was a strategic infrastructure move supporting scalability, governance, and operational resilience across Norway’s welfare systems.
About Aiven – Headquartered in Helsinki, Finland and with offices in Berlin, Germany and Sydney, Australia and Boston, MA, Aiven is an ISO 27001 certified cloud data platform provider, operating managed open-source database, event streaming, cache, search, and graphing solutions for customers worldwide.
To learn more about Aiven, visit https://aiven.io/ or follow Aiven on Twitter.
