May 9, 2023

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made a long-term investment in OpenSearch, its open-source alternative to Elasticsearch. The project has emerged as a credible competitor, garnering well over 100 million downloads and 8,760 pull requests from 496 contributors.

OpenSearch was launched by AWS in response to Elastic’s change in Elasticsearch’s license and the company’s reluctance to contribute significantly to the project. The success of OpenSearch has seen it replace Elasticsearch in Adobe’s Commerce suite and rank in the Top 50 databases for the first time on the DB-Engines database popularity rankings.

Infoworld’s Matt Asay who previously worked with AWS says he has initially been skeptical about AWS’ ability to run a successful open-source project but has been proven wrong. While David Tippett and Eli Fisher of the AWS OpenSearch team revealed that the project’s popularity has grown, with diverse contributor populations making contributions.

OpenSearch’s success is also making AWS a better company to work for and buy from. Although it has not affected Elastic’s income statement, the emergence of OpenSearch is a testament to AWS’s commitment to the open source community. The success of OpenSearch demonstrates that there can be many winners in open source, and the emergence of OpenSearch is a profound sea change.

The sources for this piece include an article in InfoWorld.