What is OpenSearch and Why You Should Use It
An introductory Bonsai explainer by Leo Schuster on OpenSearch — what it is, why it exists, and when to choose it. Companion to What is Elasticsearch and Why You Should Use It.
What It Is
“A community-driven, open-source search and analytics suite derived from Apache 2.0-licensed Elasticsearch 7.10.2 & Kibana 7.10.2.” Comprises the search engine daemon plus OpenSearch Dashboards (a Kibana fork) to ingest, secure, search, aggregate, and analyze data.
Why It Exists — The Fork
OpenSearch was created in response to Elastic’s 2021 license change, moving Elasticsearch/Kibana off Apache 2.0 to the “highly-restrictive and anti-competition SSPL.” The last open-source versions (7.10.2) were forked into OpenSearch 1.0, led by AWS. The framing is explicitly about freedom and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Differentiating Features (plugins)
Anomaly detection · Performance Analyzer · SQL · Security · Alerting · ML Commons · k-NN search · cross-cluster replication — many bundled open-source where Elastic gated them behind commercial tiers.
Compatibility
Backward-compatible with Elasticsearch 7.10.2 APIs — AWS stated the APIs would be “backwards compatible… to eliminate any need for customers to update their current client code.”
When / Why to Use It
Real-time analytics, e-commerce/media search, social networks, log analytics — anywhere you want Elasticsearch-class capability under a permissive Apache 2.0 license. Adopters cited: AWS, Bonsai, SAP, CapitalOne, RedHat, Aiven, Logz.
Related Concepts
Related Notes
- OpenSearch — the tool note
- Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch — the full comparison and licensing history
- What is Elasticsearch and Why You Should Use It — the sibling explainer