AWS today announced that it is transforming Open searchthe open source version of the popular search and analytics engine Elasticsearch, has been brought to the Linux Foundation by launching the aptly named OpenSearch Foundation.
AWS first launched the OpenSearch project in 2021, after Elastic changed its license for the Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to its own, the Elastic License. At the time, many open source software vendors chose to make similar changes, largely in an attempt to prevent major cloud providers—particularly AWS—from offering hosted services based on their software.
Ironically, this move comes just a few weeks after Elastic announced that it would once again offer Elasticsearch and Kibana under an open source license, General Intellectual Property Licensewhich requires its users to publish all of their source code if they make any changes. Interestingly, however, Elastic chose to make this an option available in parallel with its more restrictive license, because, as the company put it, “we have people who really love ELv2.”
When AWS created the OpenSearch project, there was a lot of skepticism about the project. AWS had never managed such a large project before. Mukul KarnikThis was acknowledged by the General Manager of AWS Search Services.
“When we created OpenSearch at the time, it was new for Amazon and AWS to take on an open source project and grow it,” he told me in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “From the beginning, our goal was to be community-driven and see how we could get more community members to be part of the project and contribute to it.”
Karnik noted that AWS has gradually opened up the project, encouraging broader contributions and governance. “The project has become more organic, in some ways, as we take these organic steps to figure out how to bring more people in to be part of the project.”
With today’s launch, a number of other major companies, including SAP and Uber, have joined the organization as Principal Members, with Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, Digital Ocean, Eliatra, Graylog, NetApp Instaclustr, and Portal26 joining as General Members.
Karnik noted that AWS expects to increase its contributions to OpenSearch.
Karnik said that in 2021, the foundation wasn’t on the roadmap yet, but bringing the project to its own foundation now seems like a natural next step. He noted that the OpenSearch ecosystem has added quite a few of its own innovations 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 such as the separation of compute and storage, as well as sector replication. With the rise of artificial intelligence, interest in OpenSearch as a vector database has also increased, Karnik said.
The new organization will follow the usual Linux Foundation governance model, with a board of directors 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, CEO of the Linux Foundation. “Search is something we all rely on every day, whether for work or consumption, and we look forward to supporting the OpenSearch community and helping them provide powerful search and analytics tools to organizations and individuals around the world.”
As with many similar organizations, one of the reasons AWS has decided to contribute to the project now is to gain access to the Linux Foundation’s services and expertise in managing and growing open source projects. Additionally, this move helps OpenSearch shed its perception as a project driven primarily by AWS, a critical step for continued growth and broader adoption.