How a Solutions Architect Brought Multi-Cloud Migration to OpenSearch | Tony Piazza

Aiven Senior Solutions Architect Tony Piazza joined the company in March. Within months he had merged five PRs adding Google Cloud support and Terraform-based provisioning to the OpenSearch Migration Assistant, a tool that previously only worked on AWS.

Tony talks with Jay Miller about:

Why he went from consulting to open source contribution.
How a consultant’s habit of finding project risks early shaped the work.
His first conference keynote at OpenSearchCon.
What contributing as a vendor-neutral company looks like.
Where he’s contributing next, including ML Commons, Data Prepper and the docs.

This contributor showcase is useful if you’re planning an OpenSearch migration. It’s also a good example for anyone who isn’t a full-time software engineer but wants to contribute to open source.

Chapters

0:00 Intro and a Yankees/Braves warmup

1:06 Growing up a Yankees fan named Piazza

3:59 From Kafka consulting client to Aiven solutions architect

5:05 Spotting the multi-cloud gap in OpenSearch

7:01 The RFC and five merged PRs for the Migration Assistant

8:51 Elastic licensing aside

9:03 Why a solutions architect is suited to this work

10:06 The surprise: private networking

11:57 Keynote at OpenSearchCon

14:03 Why conference talks draw people with real migration problems

16:44 Contributing as Aiven vs. a major cloud provider

19:19 Working with the AWS maintainers: everybody wins

21:14 What the Migration Assistant repo contains

23:57 Why Terraform

25:34 AWS Terraform support in two weeks

26:27 Moving into ML Commons and fixing broken CI

30:10 Wrapping up the contributions

32:31 Where to follow Tony: Data Prepper, docs and a Spark integration

34:26 Outro

Links

Tony’s GitHub: https://github.com/tonypiazza
OpenSearch Migration Assistant repo: https://github.com/opensearch-project/opensearch-migrations
ML Commons: https://github.com/opensearch-project/ml-commons
Data Prepper: https://github.com/opensearch-project/data-prepper
Aiven blog post on multi-cloud support for the Migration Assistant: https://aiven.io/blog/multi-cloud-support-for-the-opensearch-migration-assistant
Tutorial on Aiven for OpenSearch and Vertex AI: https://aiven.io/blog/a-tutorial-on-aiven-for-opensearch-and-vertex-ai