[META] Backport Windows Support for 1.x

[rishabh6788]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Coming from opensearch-project/opensearch-build#33. In order to support a Windows x64 distribution for OpenSearch 1.x each plugin needs to backport Windows CI to their 1.x branch and include tools that are windows-specific as replacements for any bash scripts.

What solution would you like?

Every component has passing CI on Windows (windows-latest on GHA), including unit, integration and bcw tests for 1.x branch, and has Windows-specific documentation, if needed.

OpenSearch

• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch common-utils#328
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch job-scheduler#274
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch security#2281
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch security-dashboards-plugin#1235
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch alerting#684
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch reporting#547
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch performance-analyzer#338
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch observability#1305
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch k-NN#635
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch asynchronous-search#208
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch anomaly-detection#737
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch index-management#617
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch sql#1114
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch ml-commons#579
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch cross-cluster-replication#634

Dashboards

• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch OpenSearch-Dashboards#3015
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch index-management-dashboards-plugin#431
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch for Dashboards sql#1137
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch for Dashboards reporting#563
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch for Dashboards observability#1324
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch opensearch-dashboards-functional-test#412
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch security-dashboards-plugin#1238
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch anomaly-detection-dashboards-plugin#360
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch dashboards-visualizations#136
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch alerting-dashboards-plugin#392

[peternied]

@rishabh6788 Can you provide the background on why we want to do this work?

Its a considerable investment for the Security plugin since its build infrastructure was rewritten for OpenSearch 2.X and I would rather focus on supporting existing platforms and new features going forward.

[CEHENKLE]

@rishabh6788 Can you provide the background on why we want to do this work?

As a general principal, when we provide support for a distribution, we provide it for all or the releases we support. Since we currently support 1.x and 2.x, it means they both need to have windows distributions.

If we don't do it this way, it means that we need to maintain a matrix somewhere for customer to go figure out what's supported where, which I think is a suboptimal experience.

[peternied]

we need to maintain a matrix somewhere for customer to go figure out what's supported where

We already do this on the downloads page [1] by pushing customers to follow a link for 1.x releases.

Are there customers interested in running 1.3 version of OpenSearch on Windows and are not interested in running 2.4? It would be a much easier for me to understand if we had a ready and waiting audience as opposed to an ideal.

[1] From https://opensearch.org/downloads.html

[dblock]

I am surprised we want Windows support in 1.x. It's a new platform, so what kind of user would want to start on an already legacy version of OpenSearch that is only receiving security fixes?

[CEHENKLE]

@dblock @peternied Barani's out, but my understanding is that we have customers who have wanted windows for the last year+, but we didn't offer it so they've made do (or rolled their own). Ideally, we would have launched 1.0 with Windows. We didn't so now we're playing catch up.

[peternied]

Recapping from offline - the Security team is all in to support Windows. I've updated the issues associated with security/security-dashboard-plugins.

• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch security#2281
• Backport Windows support to 1.x branch security-dashboards-plugin#1235