Growth and community take the spotlight at OpenSearchCon 2023

Last week, more than 300 attendees—an increase of 60% year-over-year—arrived at the Sheraton Grand Seattle for 3 days of connecting, sharing, and learning with the OpenSearch community. We renewed old friendships and built some new ones too! Thanks to everyone who took time out of their schedules to be a part of it.

There were 32 conference sessions, an unconference, a partner round table, and a hands-on workshop—all firsts for the conference.

One thing that got called out and then repeated (and even argued about online) over the course of the conference was, simply put, growth. OpenSearch’s reach (300+ million downloads to date), the number and diversity of solutions presented, and the groundbreaking vector and security use cases revealed at the conference were bar raising.

The massive growth of the community itself was called out too. From the 1,400+ people who have flocked to the project’s public Slack channel in less than 6 months, to the 30 organizations who have signed on as partners in the past year, to the 130+ papers submitted during the call-for-papers process, to the 60% year-over-year increase in attendance at the conference, the OpenSearch community showed up and came out.

The growth of the OpenSearch Project is fed from many sources. The choice of software license has no doubt played a part; as Eli observed in the conference keynote, “By putting OpenSearch under the open-source Apache 2.0 license, people were able to rapidly build, experiment, extend, and sell their own applications using OpenSearch.” Critical to the project’s continued growth is the role of an active and vocal community—as Eli noted, OpenSearch was built on the “strongly held belief that a small, but mighty, cohort of people who cared about open source, like you, would join us in making this project successful.”

The project’s growth could also be seen in the depth and breadth of learning opportunities. In addition to 32 conference sessions, our first-ever unconference brought together dozens of attendees for a lively exchange of ideas. Our first partner roundtable saw representatives from more than 20 project partners join fellow project leaders for an open-forum discussion. The conference wrapped on Friday with a workshop led by Jon Handler and Arun Lakshmanan, with more than 20 users getting hands-on experience using OpenSearch Helm charts, deploying a cluster on Kubernetes, exploring vector search, and more.

We’ll have more to share from OpenSearchCon 2023 soon, including a full set of recorded presentations to be added to our YouTube channel as soon as they’re ready. Later, we’ll follow up with information about when and where you can plan to join the community for next year’s conference. In the meantime, stay tuned to this page for news on OpenSearchCon 2024 where you can sign up to receive updates via email.

To everyone who attended, volunteered, helped spread the word, or otherwise played a role in making this year’s conference a smashing success: Thank you! Your support of the project and the community are everything that this conference is about. A special thanks as well to Jim Battenberg, Grant Ingersoll, and Mehul Shah for bringing their thought-provoking ideas to the keynote address. And to everyone else, we can’t wait for you to join us next year!