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OpenSearch has undergone significant transformation since its 2021 launch. The project’s recent move to the Linux Foundation marks a pivotal moment for the community-driven, Apache 2.0-licensed, open source data search and analytics suite.
In this On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers, NetApp’s Amanda Katona spoke with TNS Publisher and Founder Alex Williams about OpenSearch’s evolution, community growth and how neutral governance under the Linux Foundation has boosted both community contributions and enterprise adoption.
This episode was recorded in London at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe.
As leader of an open source engineering team (along with a team of developer advocates) focused on open source data infrastructure at NetApp, Katona has closely tracked OpenSearch’s evolutionary path. NetApp became invested in the OpenSearch project when Elasticsearch moved away from Apache 2.0 licensing in 2021. (A move that its creator, Elastic, reconsidered last summer.)
“We were the first managed service provider to offer services outside of AWS on Elasticsearch, and when we saw the licensing change, we saw our customers and users move into OpenSearch,” Katona said. By November 2021, she said, NetApp was offering managed services on OpenSearch.
OpenSearch reached a significant new milestone this past September when AWS transferred the project to the Linux Foundation. This transition from company-led to foundation-based governance has accelerated adoption and contribution.
“There were over 700 million downloads of OpenSearch, the last I checked,” Katona said. “Since the foundation came in, downloads are up 56% and contributors are really starting to invest in the project — it’s cool to see things are really gaining speed now.”
Which does not surprise her in the least. “At big enterprise companies, contributing upstream takes all these approvals,” she told the Makers audience. “But once a project moves under the foundation umbrella, neutral governance removes barriers to contribution.”
She also noted that the conversation around OpenSearch has similarly evolved. “We’ve gone from education around what the project does and ‘What is OpenSearch?’ as primary query, to ‘How do we migrate from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch?’”
As a managed platform supporting OpenSearch, NetApp’s own investment also continues to deepen. The company now has a dedicated engineer working on machine learning (ML) plugins, a developer advocate creating training materials, and full-time technical operations support for the project.
NetApp’s customers, Katona said, are particularly excited about performance enhancements coming in the OpenSearch 3.0 release, which is expected to be generally available sometime this month. “The biggest thing we’re looking forward to,” she said, “is the upgrade to Lucene 10, which will bring faster responses to complex search inquiries.”
As organizations deal with rapidly expanding data needs, they’re increasingly turning to OpenSearch for help. “That data expansion right now is mind-blowing,” said Katona. “You need to be able to store that data, and you need to be able to find that data, and you need to be able to search that data.”
Looking ahead, Katona believes the Linux Foundation’s involvement will further strengthen OpenSearch’s position. “We’re going to see things like product documentation have more of an emphasis. We’re going to see security audits come through the project.”
For organizations considering OpenSearch, its foundation-based governance model offers reassurance about long-term viability. “We’re seeing that continued trend of not wanting vendor lock-in,” Katona observed, with users feeling “safe” because “they do have full faith in the foundation and it being there and that project having longevity.”
Check out the full episode to learn more about NetApp’s role as a founding member of the OpenSearch Foundation, how the project’s governance mirrors Kubernetes’ successful model, and the growing focus on ML capabilities within the OpenSearch ecosystem.
