AWS brings OpenSearch under the Linux Foundation umbrella
AWS today announced that it is transitioning OpenSearch, its open source fork of the popular Elasticsearch search and analytics engine, to the Linux
AWS today announced that it is transitioning OpenSearch, its open source fork of the popular Elasticsearch search and analytics engine, to the Linux Foundation with the launch of the very aptly named OpenSearch Foundation.
AWS first launched the OpenSearch project in 2021, after Elastic changed its license for its Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to its own proprietary license, the Elastic License. At the time, several open source vendors opted for similar changes, largely in an effort to prevent the large cloud providers — and especially AWS — from offering hosted services based on their software.
Somewhat ironically, this move comes only a few weeks after Elastic announced that it would once again offer Elasticsearch and Kibana under an open source license, the AGPL, which requires its users to publish all of their source code if they made any changes. Interestingly, though, Elastic opted to make this an option that will be available in parallel with its own more restrictive license because, as the company said, “we have people that really like ELv2.”
When AWS created OpenSearch, there was quite a bit of skepticism around the project. For the most part, after all, AWS had never managed such a large project. Mukul Karnik, AWS’ general manager for its search services, acknowledged as much.
“When we created OpenSearch at that time, it was new for Amazon and AWS to take over an open source project and grow it,” he told me in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “From early on, our goal was to be community-driven and see how we can get more community members be part of the project and contribute.”
Karnik noted that AWS has progressively opened up the project, encouraging both contributions and broader governance. “It became more organic, in some ways, where we are doing these organic steps to figure out how to get more people to be part of the project.”
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What is OpenSearch by AWS?
OpenSearch is a distributed, open-source search and analytics engine derived from Elasticsearch. It was created and is maintained by Amazon Web Services (AWS) after the licensing changes made to Elasticsearch by Elastic in 2021.
Key points about OpenSearch:
Origin: It's a fork of Elasticsearch 7.10.2, the last Apache 2.0-licensed version.
features: OpenSearch provides full-text search capabilities, log analytics, application monitoring, security information and event management (SIEM), and more.
Components: It includes OpenSearch (the search engine) and OpenSearch Dashboards (for data visualization, formerly known as Kibana).
Open-source: It's released under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing for free use, modification, and distribution.
AWS integration: While it's open-source, AWS offers it as a managed service called Amazon OpenSearch Service.
Compatibility: It aims to be compatible with existing Elasticsearch and Kibana deployments to ease migration.
Community-driven: AWS encourages community contributions and involvement in the project's development.
OpenSearch is used for various applications, including website search, log analysis, and business intelligence. It's particularly popular among organizations looking for an open-source alternative to Elasticsearch that isn't tied to Elastic's new licensing terms.