1.0 is released!

Mon, Jul 12, 2021 · Andrew Hopp, Eli Fisher, Charlotte Henkle, Kyle Davis

Today is a really good day for the OpenSearch project. Since its start, the goal has been to quickly produce a version of OpenSearch that’s ready to use in production environments. After a ton of work by the OpenSearch community, we’re thrilled to announce the first general availability (GA) release of OpenSearch 1.0. Everyone in this highly-engaged and diverse community should be proud of the accomplishment in reaching this milestone together.

OpenSearch is a community-driven, open source search and analytics suite derived from Apache 2.0 licensed Elasticsearch 7.10.2 & Kibana 7.10.2. It consists of a search engine daemon (OpenSearch), a visualization and user interface (OpenSearch Dashboards), and advanced features from Open Distro for Elasticsearch like security, alerting, anomaly detection and more.

Today’s release is the culmination of several stages of development. When the repositories were initially opened, the project team recapped the entire process to that point. Since then the pace of change on OpenSearch has picked up, with the addition of the plugins from the Open Distro for Elasticsearch project, as well as key updates provided by contributors across the community. These updates include:

  1. Continual removal of proprietary code and marks. While the initial pre-Alpha effort removed the vast majority of the now redundant proprietary bits and references, additional cleaning occurred throughout the rest of development. You can now use OpenSearch with confidence that it’s free of proprietary code and references.
  2. Upgrading. OpenSearch should work equally well for you whether you’re building an application from scratch or upgrading an existing workload from an earlier version of Elasticsearch. With this in mind, the team spent time making upgrades as easy as possible. You can upgrade from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch exactly the same way you would upgrade between Elasticsearch versions in the past.
  3. Compatibility. The ever-growing cornucopia of tools and libraries that work with OpenSearch make it an even more useful search and analytics suite. The community of users has been instrumental in pointing out and helping the developers on the project understand what’s needed to ensure continued compatibility with their favorite tools. Maximizing compatibility required making changes to how versions are reported as well as maintaining important API features used by various libraries.
  4. Testing. With a project as complex as OpenSearch, robust testing ensures that small changes don’t cascade into unintended problems. The team paid special attention to making sure OpenSearch has a modern and flexible testing infrastructure that will serve the project for years to come.

The GA version of OpenSearch 1.0 also has a few enhancements since the beta:

  • Support for the ARM64 architecture for Linux,
  • Minimal artifacts for embedding of OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards into existing products and services,
  • Data stream support for OpenSearch Dashboards,
  • Span attribute visibility and filtering in the Trace Analytics plugin,
  • Scheduling and tenant support in the Reporting plugin.

You can see all the changes in the release notes.

Thank you!

This release includes a number of great contributions. From the new plugins to improvements to the CX, you make OpenSearch better every day. So without further ado, a shout-out to everyone who’s contributed to 1.0:

aadrien, abbashus, accat, ace03uec, aditjind, adkalavadia, adnapibar, aetter, afazel, akbhatta, alexz00, amistrn, amoo-miki, anan , ananzh, andy_leong, andy840314, anirudha, aparo, arunabh23, asfoorial, ashwinkumar12345, ashwinpankaj, astateofmind, AvianDo, awshurneyt, badbybirth, bbarani, Bhupendra, BlackMetalz, Bobpartb, boktorbb-amzn, bradlee, brandtj, bukhtawar, camerski, cehenkle, chenqi0805, chloe-zh, chrisdeeming, cjcjameson, cliu123, conan-kudo, dai-chen, dansimpson, davidcui1225, dbbaughe, dblock, debjanibnrj, devardee, dhiamzn, dhruvil7doshi, dirkhh, eirsep, elb3k, elfisher, erhan, erickg, fabide, flyhigh72, frotsch, Gagi, gaiksaya, GalAngel, galangel, geekygirldawn, getsaurabh02, gezimsejdiu, ginger, giu85, GoodMirek, gzurowski, hagayg, hakky54, hardik-k-shah, harmishlakhani, harold-wang, horizondave, horovits, hsiang9431-amzn, hxiao608, hyandell, igorid70, itiyamas, jainankitk, jamesiri, janhoy, jayeshathila, jcgraybill, jgough, jkeirstead, jkowall, jmazanec15, jonahcalvo, joshuali925, jotok, justme, kaituo, Katulus, kavilla, ke4qqq, keithhc2, ketanv3, kevinhwang, kgcreative, khushbr, kkhatua, krishna-ggk, kyleconroy, annie3431, lezzago, liujoycec, lizsnyder, lobdelle, lopqto, lornajane, lukkoor, maheshmr, makarthikeyan1, Malini, MartiniGuy, mattsb42-aws, mattwelke, mch2, meetshah777, mengweieric, mgodwan, micrictor, mihirsoni, mkcg, mmakaria, mosajjal, nickytd, nico, nisheedh, nknize, Northern, ohltyler, opensorcerer89, oscark, otisg, palashhedau, penghuo, peternied, peterzhuamazon, piyushdaftary, platzd, praveensameneni, psychbot, qreshi, ralph, rbridle, retzkek, rguo-aws, rmuir, robcowart, rtarek, rursprung, SalvoDiMa91, sandeshkr419, santiagobassett, saratvemulapalli, seanneumann, sejli, seraphjiang, SergioFG, setiah, shamil, sharp-pixel, shdubsh, shivani, shwetathareja, siddharthlatest, skkosuri-amzn, sksamuel, soosinha, sothawo, spapadop, spbjss, spotaws, sreekarjami, sruti1312, ssgao, stockholmux, sujithvm, sunilchadha, taewooKim, tardyp, tgurr, thalurur, TheAlgo, thealgo, itiyamas, tlfeng, tmarkley, Tom1, ttx, ttx, tvc_apisani, vachashah, vamshin , vengadanathan-s, vijayanb, vrozov, weicongs-amazon, willyb, wkruse, wnbts, wqixian, wrijeff, wusheng, xuezhou25, yadavcbala, yilintao-amzn, yizheliu-amazon, ylwu-amzn, yoavwe, yu-sun-77, yujias0706, yuxitang-amzn, zengyan-amazon, zhanghg08, zhongnansu

A special thanks goes to the OpenSearch partners who have helped make OpenSearch 1.0 possible: Aiven, Appbase.io, Bitergia, Bonsai, ElastiFlow, Eliatra, GSI Technology, Instaclustr, Logz.io, Opster, SearchBlox Software, Inc., Titaniam, and Wazuh.

If anyone is missing from these lists, please reach out and we will very gratefully make an addition!

So what’s next?

Now that OpenSearch has added test automation, built infrastructure, made updates to ensure the code is suitable for production use, and thoroughly tested, the project will be able to deliver on a more regular release cadence. Exciting things are coming for the project:

  • To ensure using OpenSearch is as easy to use as possible the intention is to release additional artifacts including RPM x64, DEB x64, DEB ARM64, RPM ARM64, MacOS ARM64, MacOS x64, and Windows x64 among others.
  • The project will make security investments such as more granular security for Index State Management and increasing SAML attribute flexibility.
  • Observability features like bucket level alerting and out of the box security and operational analytics experiences will be added to make it easier to analyze your application and infrastructure data.
  • OpenSearch will support cross cluster replication to allow you to deploy for higher availability.
  • To help you better understand your data, ML features such as FAISS library integrations and root cause analysis support will be added.

…among many others on the roadmap.

The next major milestone is OpenSearch 1.1, which is expected to release on August 30. In addition to more artifact coverage (e.g. RPM X64, DEB X64, DEB ARM64), OpenSearch 1.1 will include improvements to anomaly detection (ex. universal flow), indexing pressure protection, and notification support among others. Check out the public roadmap for more details.

How can you help?

For almost any type of contribution, the first step is opening an issue (OpenSearch, OpenSearch Dashboards). Even if you think you already know what the solution is, writing down a description of the problem you’re trying to solve will help everyone get context when they review your pull request. If it’s truly a trivial change (e.g. spelling error), you can skip this step – but when in doubt, open an issue. If you’re excited to jump in, check out the “help wanted” tag in issues.

Questions? Feedback? Let us know by opening an issue or posting in the forums. There are also biweekly Community Meetings. The community meetings will include progress updates at every session and include time for Q&A. The next community meeting is on Monday, July 26, 2021, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific time.