Amazon makes Elasticsearch open source fork with ALv2 license

Amazon has made a fork of Elasticsearch which is available open source. OpenSearch has been set up as an alternative to Elasticsearch and Kibana because they will work with a new license. OpenSearch is available under an Apache license.

Amazon’s project consists of two parts: OpenSearch, a fork of Elasticsearch 7.10.2, and OpenSearch Dashboards, a fork of Kibana 7.10.2. The existing Amazon Elasticsearch Service will also be renamed; that will be called Amazon OpenSearch Service. Under that service it is possible to run the engines of nineteen versions of Elasticsearch, in addition to the upcoming new versions of the new OpenSearch. The latter’s APIs will also be backwards compatible with Elasticsearch, eliminating the need for users to update their code.

Amazon announced earlier this year that it wanted to make Elasticsearch open source. That decision came after Elastic decided to only release Elasticsearch and Kibana under their own license and no longer under Apache License Version 2.0. As a result, developers are limited in what they can do with the software.

The OpenSearch Project is virtually a clone of Elasticsearch but is released under that ALv2 license. Amazon emphasizes that developers can therefore do almost anything with the software. It may be used and modified, but also resold as part of other services. There will also be a trade name that developers may use under certain conditions to promote OpenSearch in their products.

Although the code is already available, Amazon warns that it is not suitable for use in production at this time. A beta will be available in ‘the next few weeks’. A stable release will follow in the summer.