AWS brings OpenSearch under the Linux Foundation umbrella

AWS today announced that it is transitioning OpenSearch, its open source fork of the popular Elasticsearch search and analytics engine, to the Linux Foundation with the launch of the very aptly named OpenSearch Foundation.

AWS first launched the OpenSearch project in 2021, after Elastic changed its license for its Elasticsearch and Kibana projects to its own proprietary license, the Elastic License. At the time, several open source vendors opted for similar changes, largely in an effort to prevent the large cloud providers — and especially AWS — from offering hosted services based on their software.

Somewhat ironically, this move comes only a few weeks after Elastic announced that it would once again offer Elasticsearch and Kibana under an open source license, the AGPL, which requires its users to publish all of their source code if they made any changes. Interestingly, though, Elastic opted to make this an option that will be available in parallel with its own more restrictive license because, as the company said, “we have people that really like ELv2.”

When AWS created OpenSearch, there was quite a bit of skepticism around the project. For the most part, after all, AWS had never managed such a large project. Mukul Karnik, AWS’ general manager for its search services, acknowledged as much.

“When we created OpenSearch at that time, it was new for Amazon and AWS to take over an open source project and grow it,” he told me in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “From early on, our goal was to be community-driven and see how we can get more community members be part of the project and contribute.”

Karnik noted that AWS has progressively opened up the project, encouraging both contributions and broader governance. “It became more organic, in some ways, where we are doing these organic steps to figure out how to get more people to be part of the project.”

With today’s launch, a number of other large companies, including SAP and Uber are joining the Foundation as premier members, with Aiven, Aryn, Atlassian, Canonical, Digital Ocean, Eliatra, Graylog, NetApp Instaclustr, and Portal26 joining as general members.

Karnik noted that AWS expects to grow its contributions to OpenSearch.

Back in 2021, a foundation wasn’t on the roadmap yet, but bringing the project into its own foundation now feels like the natural next step, Karnik said. He also 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 recently introduced updates like the separation of compute and storage, as well as segment replication. With the advent of AI, interest in OpenSearch as a vector database has also increased, Karnik said.

The new Foundation will follow the usual Linux Foundation governance model, with a governing board 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, the executive director of the Linux Foundation. “Search is something we all rely on every day, for both business and consumer purposes, and we look forward to supporting the OpenSearch community and helping them provide powerful search and analytics tools for organizations and individuals around the world.”

Like with so many similar foundations, one of the reasons why AWS decided to contribute the project now is to gain access to the services and expertise of the Linux Foundation in managing and growing open-source projects. In addition, this move helps OpenSearch shed its perception as primarily an AWS-driven project, a crucial step for continued growth and broader adoption.