In response to Elastic changing its open-source software licenses on Elasticsearch and Kibana, Amazon has introduced the OpenSearch project. The project is a community-driven, open-source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana. Amazon announced earlier this year it would be creating and maintaining an Apache License, Version 2.0 fork of the open-source products.
“We are making a long-term investment in OpenSearch to ensure users continue to have a secure, high-quality, fully open source search and analytics suite with a rich roadmap of new and innovative functionality. This project includes OpenSearch (derived from Elasticsearch 7.10.2) and OpenSearch Dashboards (derived from Kibana 7.10.2),” the AWS team wrote in a post. “Additionally, the OpenSearch project is the new home for our previous distribution of Elasticsearch (Open Distro for Elasticsearch), which includes features such as enterprise security, alerting, machine learning, SQL, index state management, and more.”
According to Meadows, the goal of OpenSearch is to make it easy for independent developers, enterprise IT departments, software vendors and managed service providers to use, modify, extend, embed, monetize, resell and offer OpenSearch in their business, products and projects. As part of the release, Amazon is also publishing permissive usage guidelines for the OpenSearch trademark.
Amazon plans to rename the existing Amazon Elasticsearch Service to the Amazon OpenSearch Service.
“Aside from the name change, customers can rest assured that we will continue to deliver the same great experience without any impact to ongoing operations, development methodology, or business use,” the team wrote.
Through the open-source, Amazon will support and maintain ALv2 Elasticsearch versions as well as provide security and bug fixes and new features. Additionally, the fork’s APIs will be backwards compatible with existing service APIs.
Amazon explained the initial release of OpenSearch repos should be considered as an alpha version. A beta version will be released in the next couple of weeks and the fork should be stable and ready for production by early summer.
“We are truly excited about the potential for OpenSearch to be a community endeavor, where anyone can contribute to it, influence it, and make decisions together about its future. Community development, at its best, lets people with diverse interests have a direct hand in guiding and building products they will use; this results in products that meet their needs better than anything else,” the team wrote.
