At the beginning of this year, AWS announced the creation of a "true" open source Elasticsearch branch.

Yesterday, AWS announced the launch of the OpenSearch project, which is an open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana.

The OpenSearch project is composed of OpenSearch (fork Elasticsearch 7.10.2) and OpenSearch Dashboards (fork Kibana 7.10.2), including enterprise security, alarms, machine learning, SQL, index status management and other functions. All software in the OpenSearch project adopts the Apache License 2.0 open source license agreement.

AWS introduced that their OpenSearch removed the functions, codes and trademarks restricted by the Elastic commercial license in Elasticsearch to be compatible with Apache License 2.0, claiming that this is the foundation on which everyone can build and innovate, and anyone does not need to sign a CLA ( Contributor License Agreement) to contribute code to the project.

In addition, the existing Amazon Elasticsearch Service of AWS has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. AWS stated that the name change will not affect the business being operated. Amazon OpenSearch Service will provide a series of open source engines for deployment and operation, including the currently available 19 The version of Elasticsearch (7.9 and earlier, and the recently launched 7.10) and the new version of OpenSearch.

AWS also said that it will continue to support and maintain Elasticsearch with Apache License 2.0 through security and bug fixes, and will provide all new features through OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards. The Amazon OpenSearch Service API will be backward compatible with existing service APIs. In addition, AWS will provide a seamless upgrade path from existing Elasticsearch 6.x and 7.x managed clusters to OpenSearch.

AWS said that the current version of the code is still in the alpha stage, has not been thoroughly tested and is not suitable for use in a production environment. They plan to release a Beta version in the next few weeks, and are expected to release a stable version in mid-2021 and put it into production environment.

Many organizations, including Red Hat, SAP, Capital One, and Logz.io, have expressed support for AWS to create the OpenSearch project.