OpenSearch really appears to have a significant amount of development momentum. It is functionally equivalent with Elasticsearch. There would be no incentive for AWS to do this. After ES broke their compatibility with OpenSearch they also broke compatibility with their own older versions. This forced users to choose in order to move forward with anything. I don’t know how it worked out for others but I’ve converted hundreds of ES clusters to OS and switched all development to OpenSearch because they started gaining momentum and didn’t make decisions that were actively hostile to their users.
Edit: As long as OpenSearch doesn’t start breaking the self hosted use case, I don’t see any reason to consider Elasticsearch again. In fact, ES would have to offer up a significant advantage to overcome the bother.
I see a couple people on here claiming this, but no data to back it up. Elastic beats out OpenSearch by a wide margin on every metric I've thought to check (gh stars, gh stars rate of increase, number of commits, number of pull requests opened, number of pull requests merged, number of issues, stack overflow questions...). Not a single one shows OpenSearch ahead.
What metric are you using to come to the conclusion that OpenSearch is the more valuable brand?
A big question is New + Churning installs. I'd expect a scary portion of the New, and inherently slower rate of Churn are heading to OS instead ES. The curves support that: note that ES isn't substantively growing on that chart. Anecdotally, we see most new installs as leaning to OS in the security industry, which is one of the top money makers for ES/OS.
For one, we don't have to pay for basic amenities like security and alerts. To heck with gouging the customer for basic feature sets. Aws have their faults, but enabling teams to get the whole elastic experience without the weird nickle and diming is a blessing. Good on Amazon and boo elastic.
This evidence can only come from financial accounting. Amazon does not report OpenSearch results separately so you’re looking for data that does not exist in a public form. It’s a waste of time.
> This evidence can only come from financial accounting.
That's not true—we're talking about brand value, not financial value of the product. If AWS switched over to offering ElasticSearch again (not that they will) and ditched OpenSearch, I have no reason to believe that their financial numbers would go down a bit.
Brand value is nearly impossible to measure, but to the extent that you can it'd be by measuring perception among those outside the company, not through an accounting of the company's actual revenue.
Think of it this way: the brand LENRUE [0] is worth approximately zero. The company that makes these products could rebrand tomorrow and their revenue stream wouldn't take a hit in the slightest. But the company presumably actually makes some amount of money.
For Elastic vs OpenSearch, the brand value of the two products should be loosely comparable by looking at some measures of public perceptions, and I can't find any measurement that would suggest OpenSearch is in the lead.
I'm basing it off my own experience with managers, developers, and sysadmins. No one wants Elastic Search over Open Search. We're spending all our money on Open Search. Whenever I mention Elastic Search I may as well have just farted. Everyone hates the support and enterprise licensing model. We already pay for AWS support anyways so why not use their fork? Why add yet another vendor to our tech stack?
interesting. I've heard of ElasticSearch a gazillion times and this is the first time I've heard of "OpenSearch", and I've also been using AWS since it came out basically.
thats a super one sided set of metrics. it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have.
I don't have those metrics or an opinion, im just saying that value is based on utilization by a product's target users, not support activities.
> it doesn't tell us anything about how many people are actually using one, just how much visible dev activity they have
Stars and rate of star growth and stack overflow activity are all passable proxies. They're not great, and I'm open to better metrics, but they're what I can find.
Truly, if anyone can give me any metric that shows OpenSearch ahead I'll shut up. I can't find one, and I've looked.
AWS revenue. Internal AWS stats. Open search client pulls (not sure if the client is different now). Opensearch is mainly going to be used on AWS so that won't show up as much in GitHub stars.
None of those metrics measure the value of the brand, so none of those metrics are useful for the question that this thread is about: figuring out if AWS benefits from sticking with the OpenSearch brand.
If I'm right that OpenSearch has a weak brand, Amazon could switch and their internal stats and revenue wouldn't budge.
I think it's nuanced. I'm currently managing an engineering team on an interim basis. During standup I noticed that most engineers were talking about 'elastic' or 'elasticsearch' but one was talking about opensearch. I asked them to clarify that for me and they told me that they transitioned to AWS opensearch but still use the old name for the product often - that might point to the strength of the Elastic brand.
Perhaps the fact that AWS has got years of time investment already made into OpenSearch and staying with their own version allows them to reduce risks should Elastic attempt to change ElasticSearch’s license again.
Large tech companies care about their reputation. If they dropped their own fork and went back and started again from Elastic that would be admitting their own incompetence. So not happening.
I think the bigger risk to Amazon: what if Elastic wants to pull the rug out from under them once again? Why take that risk when Amazon is already stable? Given the duration since the fork, I suspect there are more than a couple of features differences between the products that would have to be smoothed over.
Recently tried OpenSearch, it has good momentum but tbf the tooling / documentation and support are not that great.
Contrary to what other people are saying in this thread, I would not say it has better branding than ElasticSearch and that ES has lost its battle. Outside AWS OpenSearch is still not a big contender
None of these are examples of shakedowns - they are just posts about adopting a license. Do you have any examples of shakedowns? 'Cos that's quite a claim you made there, and surely there are some examples.
The point of DBaaS is that you wrap an open source database with a proprietary control plane that you won't release. Cloud vendors say this is compliant with AGPL but database startups say it isn't and thus the cloud vendors need to buy a license.
None of those pages you linked say anything like that, you're just making stuff up.
One of them is not the company talking about their license choice but a FUD article crying about AGPL which we've seen a million tired versions of.
The Rethink one says
> * Require users who choose to modify RethinkDB to fit their needs to release the patches to the software development community.
> * Require users who are unwilling to release the patches to the software development community to purchase a commercial license.
note:
> * who choose to modify RethinkDB
and
> * release the patches
none of these say anything about problems with putting control planes in front of it.
I have worked with cloud hosting a database where the only feature behind the enterprise license is a load balancer with some dead simple authz plugins.
You can write put any LB in front of it and host and sell it with the same capabilities without violating the OSS license.
Adding a "control plane" that sits in front of the hosted database does not require you to publish any modifications unless you actually are running a modified version of the open source software. You would never have to publish your own LB.
it happens - why would you think commercial operators who’ve chosen a dual-license model wouldn’t protect their IP? That’s literally their breadwinner.
what element was "bad faith", that the query was nonsense? Point me at anything that would legally or even ethically constitute a "shakedown" as alleged by OP, who it appears in the subthread to have misread the license?
like, answer the question instead of evading, surely it cannot be that hard.
well importantly, Elastic was originally Apache-2.0. Then Amazon started using their stuff and they relicensed to their not-really-FOSS-license. Then Amazon forked their stuff, a bunch of legal conflicts happened. Now they are friends again. And now they relicensed to AGPL (which is FOSS).
So they were originally Apache-2.0 which was permissive versus now they are AGPL which is copyleft.
The important distinction here is that if Amazon was to use Elastic directly, they'd have to make their contributions available to users and those users could then upstream those contributions back to Elastic. In the old situation with Apache-2.0, Amazon could take contributions from Elastic but then they kept them themself for the most part without up-streaming.
This forces a give-and-take relationship vs a one-way relationship.
Also importantly now that Elastic is AGPL they can integrate anything they want from OpenSearch's Apache-2.0 licensed projects but unless OpenSearch becomes AGPL as well, they can't pull any contributions from Elastic.
There's a difference though. Prior to the relicensing, Amazon had a private fork they were running and weren't contributing upstream. Only after the relicense did they open source their fork.
Now you have two open source projects and one has a copyleft license and the other has a permissive license.
Taking contributions from the permissive to the copyleft project isn't ripping off contributions. It's using open source software and collaborating in the FOSS ecosystem. And Amazon would be free to pull contributions back the other way just as well as long as they agree to the mutual terms of the AGPL (which is by all means a FOSS license).
