Graham Gillen
Pureinsights was happy to be an exhibitor at the inaugural OpenSearchCon last week and we wanted to share some of the highlights and insights of OpenSearchCon 2022 while it was still fresh in our minds. Our commentary is based what we gleaned from the presentations at the event as well as our own experience with the early days of Lucene / Solr Revolution and Elasticon.
A Meetup That Blossomed into a Real Event
“We have reached capacity for OpenSearchCon 2022”
That was a surprising headline to see on the even registration page as what started out as a 40-person OpenSearch meetup quickly blossomed into an event with several hundred attendees in less than six months.
The result was an event that had the community feel of the early Lucene / Solr Revolution events, if not quite the glamour of the first Elasticon. Though the later did benefit from the influx of VC money and the pressure to launch with a big splash in San Francisco. Overall, we were very pleasantly surprised and look forward to this event growing next year.
The OpenSearch Road Map: Guiding Philosophy
OpenSearch presented their Road Map and plans beyond 2022 and we understand that most of the presentations will be available on YouTube in the near future. We will alert our readers as to when that happens. In the meantime, we can summarize some of the key principles that OpenSearch product management seems committed to:
- Community – true to the nature of true open source projects, OpenSearch is committed to fostering a true sense of community among its developers and contributors.
- Transparency – open source also means a commitment to transparency, which means less confusion regarding project road maps and licensing (critical for third-party solution vendors).
- Multi-Cloud – despite the heavy involvement of AWS, OpenSearch promises to make it easy to deploy in the users’ choice of one or more major cloud providers.
- Scalability – data volumes continue to grow exponentially, so the ability to ingest, store and analyze increasingly large datasets will continue to be critical.
- Currency of Innovation – In addition to anomaly detection and regression, OpenSearch intends to keep up with the latest innovations in search technologies including vector search and AI / machine learning capabilities.
With OpenSearch 2.2 just launched, you can check out future plans yourself on the OpenSearch roadmap on GitHub for versions 2.3 to 3.0 and beyond.
Vendors Commit to OpenSearch
Whether as exhibitors and/or presenters, there was already much third-party vendor support for OpenSearch at OpenSearchCon. This is not surprising, since Elastic’s new licensing has made its use problematic as an embedded solution in various search-based application platforms.
- In the log analytics space, we saw Logz.io and Graylog (an early Elasticsearch champion)
- In the cloud deployment and monitoring space, we saw Opster present on their OpenSearch Kubernetes Operator
- Searchium.ai was a new vendor we’ve run across that’s an API-based solution for search / ML
- In the traditional web / e-commerce / enterprise search space, SearchBlox was there
- And of course, Pureinsights was there to talk about the Pureinsights Discovery Platform™ (PDP). OpenSearch is the default embedded search engine in PDP (though other search engines are also supported)
This vendor commitment does not guarantee success for OpenSearch, but it is a natural partnering of solutions that made OpenSearchCon a stark contrast to Elasticon, which is dominated by Elastic offerings, and Solr / Lucene Revolution, which became ACTIVATE, a Lucidworks customer event.
Summary
OpenSearchCon 2022 confirmed to us that OpenSearch has come a long way in the past 18 months and the organization has managed to maintain its momentum since it was branched off of Elasticsearch. An article in TechRepublic by Matt Asay seems to agree – One year of OpenSearch: Grading AWS’ Open Source Effort.
With growing community and vendor support, the next key milestone for OpenSearch is to see published case studies of successful, large-scale product deployments by big-name companies. This could be Elasticsearch migration stories or totally new deployments. That will certainly make the next OpenSearchCon even more interesting.
If you help with your OpenSearch project, or are considering migrating from another solution to OpenSearch, please CONTACT US for a free 1:1 consultation.
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