Elasticsearch releases new major versions approximately every 18 months, with the most recent version, Elasticsearch 8, having been released in February of this year (2022; Elastic). Staying up to date with upgrades is very important since older versions eventually reach End Of Life (EOL) and become unsupported. Additionally, new major version releases include many new features and capabilities that a company like Shopify would like to utilize. This project completed the initial work required to upgrade Shopify’s Elasticsearch clusters from Elasticsearch 7 (Shopify’s current Elasticsearch version) to Elasticsearch 8. Through this project, we confirmed that we can successfully run Elasticsearch 8 on our existing infrastructure, addressed deprecations and breaking changes in our application, and confirmed our application runs successfully in Continuous Integration (CI) with Elasticsearch 8. The final step of the upgrade process, which involves upgrading Shopify’s Elasticsearch clusters to run Elasticsearch 8 in production, is not covered within the scope of this project.