How to build a cross-Region resilience for Amazon OpenSearch Service with Amazon MSK

This article explains how to build cross-Region resilience for Amazon OpenSearch Service using Amazon MSK with active-active replication.

• Amazon MSK Replicator enables bidirectional cross-Region data replication with near real-time synchronization
• Amazon OpenSearch Ingestion (OSI) pipelines consume Kafka data and index into OpenSearch collections
• Active-active architecture maintains synchronized datasets across AWS Regions without manual failover
• Solution supports both OpenSearch Service managed clusters and OpenSearch Serverless collections
• Regional-first approach: data sources write to local MSK clusters, then replicate cross-Region
• Automatic loop prevention and consumer group offset synchronization enable seamless failover
• Prerequisites include VPC setup, OpenSearch collections, MSK clusters with IAM authentication, and Multi-VPC connectivity
• Replication lag typically one to few seconds for KB-sized data between Regions
• Dead Letter Queues and CloudWatch monitoring recommended for reliability and observability

This solution provides automatic cross-Region data synchronization for OpenSearch with minimal operational overhead and active-active failover capabilities.