In early 2021, on the heels of a major licensing change by Elastic, Amazon announced the OpenSearch project, a code branch of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. In the third and last of a three-part OpenSearch vs Elasticsearch blog series, we examine Amazon’s point-of-view and reactions. Other blogs in the series cover the User point-of-view and the Elastic point-of-view.

Amazon’s Role in Fueling OpenSearch vs Elasticsearch

There are two ways to view the OpenSearch vs Elasticsearch debate. One is an evaluation of two search platforms, based on their features, functionality, and technical merits. Another is to view the two companies backing these platforms, making this an Elastic vs Amazon / AWS debate. That is because it’s questionable if OpenSearch would have gotten off the ground without Amazon behind the launch.

OpenSearch can trace its origins to Open Distro, which was a branch of Elasticsearch announced in 2019. There have been other middling attempts to branch Elastic code, such as Banana, a branch of Kibana that is meant to be paired with Solr. Open Distro had the advantage of launching with the support of AWS which lent much more weight to the open-source project. Amazon also contributed security, monitoring and management code to Open Distro, to try to make it comparable to Elastic’s X-Pack offering at the time.

One can speculate whether Amazon’s support for Open Distro was a hedge against a tumultuous relationship, or some distaste for how quickly Elastic cozied up to Microsoft and Google. “The friend of my enemy is my enemy”? Publicly, AWS wore a white hat and stated publicly that Open Distro was started in support of keeping the code fully open source.

In any case, Open Distro did not make a lot of waves in the market when it launched. If you were an AWS customer, your preferred option was still to use Amazon Elasticsearch Service – the “original” distribution of the code. That is, until Elastic’s license changes forced Amazon’s hand, leading to a “relaunch” of Open Distro as OpenSearch. As Elastic and Amazon’s lawyers racked up legal fees, Amazon was ultimately forced to drop its “pure” Elasticsearch service and create the Amazon OpenSearch Service. This move – with the full weight of Amazon’s backing – is what truly gave life to OpenSearch vs Elasticsearch.

Amazon’s History with Open Source

There are many examples of tech behemoths learning to “playing nice” with open source, most notably IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, and Microsoft’s pivot to being more open source friendly. On the one hand, these were PR-driven moves to combat the “evil empire” image that these companies might have developed, but on the other hand, it was also a move to attract engineering talent that wanted more open, less “toxic” work environments.

There are parallels between these examples and AWS, but Amazon’s ultimate business strategy has always made it supportive of open source.  When your core business is running a massive cloud compute platform – much like a utility – it benefits you to support customers’ ability to run a low-cost / no-cost software stacks on top of your cloud to keep operating costs to a minimum. It would be like Elon Musk selling cars below cost to make money from Tesla charging networks.