Aiven joins the OpenSearch^® community

UPDATE: Aiven has now released Aiven for OpenSearch, built on Elasticsearch 7 and offering all the same functionality at the time of the launch.

The story so far

On January 14, 2021, the world of Elasticsearch turned upside down as Elastic.io announced a change in their licencing policy starting from release 7.11. Their new, more restrictive licencing will no longer permit Elasticsearch to be offered as a service to third parties.

A number of companies, Aiven included, immediately took a stance for open source, and an upcoming open source fork for Elasticsearch and Kibana was announced, spearheaded by AWS.

Now that fork has a name, a scope and a plan.

Aiven is for OpenSearch

On April 12, 2021, AWS published a more comprehensive outline of their plans, including a name for the new project: OpenSearch. Details are available on the OpenSearch community site and in the AWS announcement, but in brief, this community-driven project includes OpenSearch (from Elasticsearch 7.10.2), OpenSearch Dashboards (from Kibana 7.10.2), and Open Distro for Elasticsearch (providing additional features). Everything will be released under the Apache Licence Version 2.0, free to modify, extend, embed, monetize, resell and offer as a service.

The thing to note is that OpenSearch is still very much in Alpha and not ready to be productized. As soon as the project is released and Aiven has had a chance to evaluate it, we’ll pick it up and make it available for our customers. Our current timeline guesstimate for this is by the end of this summer. And of course, at that point we’ll change our product name, too.

Effects of the change

These changes will have no impact whatsoever on the availability, maintenance or service level of current Aiven for Elasticsearch users. When we pick up the eventual OpenSearch branch, it is likely that not much will change to begin with.

Aiven will continue to address any issues in all the Elasticsearch versions we provide and continue to offer the high level of support we’re known for.

Wrapping up

Aiven is eagerly awaiting the first iteration of the OpenSearch project and looks forward to being an active contributor. See you on GitHub!

(Want to join us in our contributions? Check out our Careers page for positions in the Open Source Office, product development and corporate functions.)

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