Welcome to OpenSearch

Bonsai has officially rolled out support for OpenSearch 1.0.0! Users can now choose between OpenSearch and Elasticsearch when creating a cluster. This post marks the first in a series of tutorials on OpenSearch: what it is, why we’re supporting it, and how to get started using it!If you want to skip around to the other posts in this series, they can be found here:

1. Welcome to OpenSearch
2. Up and Running With OpenSearch
3. How to migrate from an Elasticsearch cluster to OpenSearch

So What Is OpenSearch?

OpenSearch was created as a response to Elastic’s decision to switch from the Apache 2 license to the highly-restrictive and anti-competition SSPL. The change was motivated to protect Elastic’s IP from (primarily) Amazon, but it also affected providers like Bonsai in the process (you can read more about it here). The move raised eyebrows in the open source community for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this post. In short, the final open source version of Elasticsearch (7.10.2) was forked, and that fork became OpenSearch. According to the creators of OpenSearch:

“OpenSearch is a community-driven, open source search and analytics suite derived from Apache 2.0 licensed Elasticsearch 7.10.2 & Kibana 7.10.2. It consists of a search engine daemon, OpenSearch, and a visualization and user interface, OpenSearch Dashboards. OpenSearch enables people to easily ingest, secure, search, aggregate, view, and analyze data. These capabilities are popular for use cases such as application search, log analytics, and more. With OpenSearch people benefit from having an open source product they can use, modify, extend, monetize, and resell how they want. At the same time, OpenSearch will continue to provide a secure, high-quality search and analytics suite with a rich roadmap of new and innovative functionality.”

So essentially, it provides feature parity with Elasticsearch, while remaining open source-friendly. We also hope to see X-Pack-like functionality without the burden of an expensive license.The main benefit of OpenSearch today is the Apache license and the open source focus. As the product evolves, we will see more features unique to OpenSearch. Because OpenSearch development is focused on community needs rather than shareholder value, we hope to see better solutions to the evolving use cases in the industry.

What Does This Mean To Our Existing Customers?

More options! We’re keeping all of our existing Elasticsearch infrastructure in place and we have no plans to deprecate support for Elasticsearch. Users now have the option to choose Elasticsearch or OpenSearch when provisioning clusters (described in the next post).Our team is focused on making the transition process smooth and pain free. We’re working on some tooling that would allow existing Elasticsearch users to migrate over to OpenSearch with a few button clicks.We hope this blog gives you some clarity about this new exciting change. Check out the next post in this series, Up and Running With OpenSearch. If you have any questions about this or any other search topics, please feel free to reach us at support@bonsai.io or let us know your thoughts on Twitter: @bonsaisearch.