The first major version of AWS’ Elasticsearch distribution is done, extending its security and alerting plugins amongst other things.

After stirring controversy in the open source community by announcing Open Distro for Elasticsearch earlier the year, AWS has now made v1.0 available as a Docker image, RPM, and Debian package. AWS supposedly started the project together with Netflix and the Expedia Group, because customers felt insecure about Elastic’s approach of having code of proprietary and free features accessible.

AWS’ VP Cloud Architecture Strategy Adrian Cockcroft criticised the “lack of clarity as to what customers who care about open source are getting and what they can depend on” back then, and spoke of a “muddying” of waters between the community and proprietary code. Elastic’s Shay Bannon countered saying forks and redistributions “were built to serve their own needs, drive confusion, and splinter the community”.

Whichever party you side with, v1.0 is now out in the open, trying to keep the promise of a “value-added distribution” with additional security and monitoring features. The Security plugin for example now comes with a new version of the LDAP/Active Directory module that facilitates querying of multiple role bases amongst other things. It also saw the implementation of support for a new configuration syntax and streamlined YAML configuration.

Open Distro 1.0 also includes a Job Scheduler that supports interval and cron scheduling other plugins can use to schedule periodic jobs. Other than that the Alerting plugin has been fitted with action throttling support and monitors for the specification of where criteria in a query. 

The plugins provided by Open Distro 1.0 now support v7.01 of Elasticsearch and Kibana – the official Elasticsearch offering is at version 7.2 as of June 2018. Project sources can be found in the Open Distro repository at GitHub, where they are offered under the Apache License 2.0.