Running OpenSearch in production at scale is very different from what tutorials or books show. When you manage many clusters, you start seeing issues you didn’t know existed, like shard and disk imbalance, uneven traffic distribution, and unstable cluster states. These problems can degrade search performance and even cause incidents.

In this session, we will share real challenges we faced while operating large OpenSearch clusters and the practical solutions we used to stabilize them. We will explore how shard distribution can silently create problems, why some nodes end up using much more disk than others, and how clusters behave under heavy indexing and query load.

This talk focuses on the operational side of running OpenSearch in production. We’ll discuss strategies for better shard allocation, preventing disk imbalance, controlling indexing pressure, and keeping clusters stable under load.

Attendees will leave with practical techniques they can apply to run OpenSearch clusters reliably at large scale and improve stability and performance in real-world environments.