AWS on Tuesday officially announced it will move OpenSearch—the open source derivative of the popular Elasticsearch search and analytics engine—under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, effective with the launch of the new OpenSearch Foundation.
AWS launched the OpenSearch project in 2021, after Elastic changed the licence terms for its Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to a proprietary model called the Elastic Licence. At the time, several other open source vendors made similar moves, in large part as a way to discourage the major cloud providers—especially AWS—from offering hosted services based on their software.
This is somewhat ironic, given the development comes only weeks after Elastic announced it would restore Elasticsearch and Kibana back to an open source licence, namely the AGPL. Under this licence, users have to commit their code to open source if they deploy its modified versions. The curious thing is that Elastic has decided to distribute this alongside its own far more prohibitive license—the company explained, “We have people that really like ELv2.” 
When AWS announced OpenSearch, there was quite a high level of scepticism regarding the whole effort. After all, let’s just say that AWS had never done anything on this scale before. That certainly was true for Mukul Karnik, general manager for search services at AWS.
At the time we launched OpenSearch, this was a very new thing for Amazon and AWS to take an open source project and adopt it, then extend it,” he told me during an interview ahead of today’s news. “Right from the very beginning, what we’ve aimed to do is make this truly about community: having more community involvement, more community contributions to the project.
That is to say, Karnik observed how AWS incrementally scaled the project to include contributors and enhance its governance. “It evolved in a more organic fashion, whereby we take these natural steps to determine how to include more people in the project.
Today it was announced that it has onboarded leading companies, including SAP and Uber, as its premier members. General members include Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, Digital Ocean, Eliatra, Graylog, NetApp Instaclustr, and Portal 26.
Karnik added that AWS expects its contributions to OpenSearch to increase over a period of time.
Setting up a foundation was not part of the plan in 2021, Karnik said, but moving the project to its own foundation now seems like an orderly evolution. The OpenSearch ecosystem has brought several innovations to the project, most noticeably evolving from a cluster-based system to a more cloud-native architecture. Lately, changes such as the separation of compute and storage and segment replication have been made to the project. Karnik added that with AI on the rise, there’s emerging interest in OpenSearch as a vector database.
The new Foundation will operate under the Apache 2.0 licence, under the Linux Foundation’s standard governance model, with a governing board and a technical steering committee.
The Linux Foundation is happy to provide a neutral home where open collaborative development can happen in open source search and analytics,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director at the Linux Foundation. “Search is one of the fundamental tools that we depend upon every day for businesses or consumers. We look forward to supporting the OpenSearch community in their effort to deliver robust search and analytics solutions for organisations and individuals globally.
Similar to many such open-source foundations, a big reason AWS is committing to the project now is so it can tap into the Linux Foundation’s services and experience in managing and growing open-source projects. For its part, OpenSearch benefits from losing some of the baggage associated with being an AWS-centric project, something that is necessary to carry on growth and broader adoption.
