Shay Banon

Creator of Elasticsearch (2010) and founder of Elastic. Originally built Elasticsearch as a distributed search layer on top of Apache Lucene; it became the foundation of the ELK stack and the dominant open-source search engine.

The 2021 license change from Apache 2.0 to SSPL/Elastic License — driven by Elastic to protect against cloud providers running Elasticsearch as a managed service — led AWS to fork Elasticsearch 7.10.2 as OpenSearch.

Related

• Elasticsearch — the engine he created
• Elastic — the company he founded
• Elasticsearch vs OpenSearch — the fork that reshaped the search platform landscape
• OpenSearch vs. Elasticsearch A Comprehensive Comparison in 2025 — historical context covered by Frank Goortani