AWS Brings OpenSearch Under the Wings of the Linux Foundation

AWS announced today that it’s moving to a new edition Open searchits open source fork of the popular Elasticsearch search and evaluation engine to the Linux Foundation with the launch of the OpenSearch Foundation.

AWS first launched the OpenSearch project in 2021, after Elastic modified the license for its Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to its own proprietary license, the Elastic License. At the time, several open source vendors made similar changes, largely to stop large cloud providers—especially AWS—from offering hosted services based on their software.

Ironically, the move comes just weeks after Elastic announced it might be re-offering Elasticsearch and Kibana under an open source license, AGPL-ewhich requires users to publish the entire source code in the event that they make any changes. Interestingly, Elastic decided to make this selection available alongside its own, more restrictive license because, as the company said, “we have people who really like ELv2.”

When AWS created OpenSearch, there was loads of skepticism surrounding the project. After all, AWS had never managed a project of this size before. Mukul KarnikAWS general manager for search services, admitted as much.

“When we started OpenSearch at the time, Amazon and AWS were new to taking an open source project and developing it,” he told me in an interview before today’s announcement. “Our goal from the very beginning was to be community-driven and see how we could get more community members to participate and contribute to the project.”

Karnik noted that AWS has step by step opened up the project, encouraging each input and broader governance. “It’s become more organic, in a sense, where we’re taking these organic steps to figure out how to get more people to participate in the project.”

With today’s launch, many other major corporations have joined the Foundation, including SAP and Uber, who’ve change into premium members, while Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, Digital Ocean, Eliatra, Graylog, NetApp Instaclustr, and Portal26 have change into general members.

Karnik noted that AWS expects its contribution to OpenSearch to extend.

In 2021, the foundation wasn’t on the roadmap yet, but now moving the project into its own foundation looks like a natural next step, Karnik said. He also noted that the OpenSearch ecosystem has added quite just a few innovations of its own to the project, including moving it from a cluster-based system to a more cloud-native architecture. He also noted that the project has recently introduced updates like separating compute and storage, in addition to segment replication. With the advent of artificial intelligence, interest in OpenSearch as a vector database has also increased, Karnik said.

The recent Foundation will operate under the standard Linux Foundation governance model, with an oversight board and a technical steering committee.

“The Linux Foundation is excited to provide a neutral home for open and collaborative development around open source search and analytics,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “Search is something we rely on every day, for both business and consumer use, and we look forward to supporting the OpenSearch community and helping them deliver powerful search and analytics tools to organizations and individuals around the world.”

Like many similar foundations, one of the reasons AWS has decided to contribute to the project now could be to achieve access to the Linux Foundation’s services and expertise in managing and developing open source projects. Additionally, the move helps OpenSearch shed its perception of being primarily an AWS-driven project, a key step for continued growth and broader adoption.