OpenSearch 1.0 has been released by the project team, meaning that the community-driven search and analytics suite is considered ready to deploy in production environments.
OpenSearch is a fully open-source suite of tools, developed as a fork of the widely-used Elasticsearch and Kibana. It includes the OpenSearch search engine daemon (derived from Elasticsearch 7.10.2) and the OpenSearch Dashboards visualisation and user interface (derived from Kibana 7.10.2), along with features drawn from the Open Distro for Elasticsearch such as security, alerting and anomaly detection.
The OpenSearch project was initiated by AWS early in 2021 following the decision by Elastic, developer of Elasticsearch and Kibana, to stop licensing new versions of its software under the open-source Apache License. These are now dual-licensed under a Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Elastic License, neither of which is recognised as a true open-source license.
This move by Elastic was part of a wider disagreement in which developers claimed that cloud operators were taking their open-source products and building commercial services around them without contributing anything back to the open-source community. The terms of the SSPL mean that any cloud provider building a service on Elasticsearch and Kibana is required to make the entire source code of that service available under the same licence.
With the release of OpenSearch 1.0, there is now effectively a fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana available under the Apache License 2.0 which will continue to be maintained and developed. OpenSearch 1.0 can be downloaded from the OpenSearch site.
Announcing the release on the OpenSearch project blog, the developer team said that it has spent a great deal of time on the removal of proprietary code and marks from the code repositories it started with, as well as on compatibility testing.
According to the team, users will be able to upgrade from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch exactly the same way they have upgraded between Elasticsearch versions in the past.
OpenSearch 1.0 has a few enhancements since the beta release, such as support for the ARM64 architecture for Linux and data stream support for OpenSearch Dashboards.
Looking ahead, the OpenSearch project team said it expects to release updates on a regular release cadence, with OpenSearch 1.1 expected on August 30. Already planned on the roadmap are security enhancements such as more granular security for Index State Management, and observability features like bucket level alerting and out of the box security and operational analytics experiences.