Fatal Exception While Upgrading Camunda – Elasticsearch Version Downgrade Error on EKS

Camunda 8 Topics
1

Environment

  • Platform: AWS EKS

  • Camunda Helm Chart Version: 13.5.0

  • Elasticsearch Version (configured): 8.19.12

Issue Description

I am facing a fatal error while upgrading Camunda on an AWS EKS cluster. During startup, Elasticsearch fails to boot with the following exception:

java.lang.IllegalStateException: cannot downgrade a node from version [8.19.12] to version [8.19.5]

What I’ve Tried

  • Explicitly set the Elasticsearch version to 8.19.12 in values-enterprise.yaml

  • Verified that the Helm values reflect the correct Elasticsearch version

  • Re-deployed using Helm upgrade

Despite this, the error persists and Elasticsearch still attempts to start with version 8.19.5, causing the downgrade failure.

Looking For

Any guidance on:

  • Properly aligning Elasticsearch versions during Camunda upgrades

  • Whether deleting/recreating PVCs is required in this scenario

  • Best practices for Elasticsearch upgrades with Camunda Helm charts on EKS

Thanks in advance for any help or pointers!

2

This is a known Elasticsearch version downgrade issue where you cannot downgrade once data has been written with a newer version due to Lucene codec incompatibility. I found the following relevant resources:

Does this help? If not, can anyone from the community jump in? :waving_hand:

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