AWS Elasticsearch, now known as Amazon OpenSearch Service, is a fully managed service that enables users to deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch clusters in the cloud. Elasticsearch is a powerful, open-source search and analytics engine designed for use cases like log analytics, full-text search, and real-time data visualization.
With AWS’s managed service, users can avoid the complexity of setting up and maintaining their own Elasticsearch clusters. It provides built-in security, automated backups, monitoring, and easy scaling to handle large datasets efficiently. Additionally, it integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like Amazon S3, CloudWatch, and Kinesis, making it a popular choice for log analysis, application monitoring, and search functionality.
Despite the rebranding to Amazon OpenSearch Service, it remains backward-compatible with Elasticsearch up to version 7.10, ensuring a smooth transition for existing users. Whether for searching documents, analyzing logs, or visualizing real-time data, AWS Elasticsearch (OpenSearch) is a robust solution for businesses and developers.
OpenSearch is often used for a variety of use-cases, including Log Analytics, Security Analytics, Vector Search and more.
What Is Amazon OpenSearch Service?
Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed service that simplifies setting up, running, and scaling OpenSearch clusters on AWS cloud services.
An OpenSearch Service domain is equivalent to an OpenSearch cluster containing the settings, instance kinds, instance counts, and storage resources you define. Amazon OpenSearch Service supports both OpenSearch and classic Elasticsearch OSS (up to version 7.10, the software's final open-source release). When you create a domain, you can choose which search engine to use.
The solution sets up all the resources for your OpenSearch cluster and launches it. It also automatically finds and replaces broken nodes, lowering the overhead associated with self-managed infrastructures. Scaling your cluster requires only one API call or a few terminal clicks.
Amazon OpenSearch Service integrates with Amazon CloudWatch to monitor OpenSearch Service domain metrics and generate alerts. The service also integrates with AWS CloudTrail for auditing configuration API calls to OpenSearch Service domains. The integration with Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon DynamoDB allows streaming data to be loaded into the OpenSearch Service.
How Is OpenSearch Different From Elasticsearch?
When OpenSearch 1.0 diverged from Elasticsearch 7.10.2, it maintained feature parity. Since then, the products have started to diverge.
For fundamental and common use cases, including text search, log analytics, dashboards, and so on, there is no discernible difference between ElasticSearch and OpenSearch. Both technologies will serve the same goal.
Elasticsearch will be easier to integrate from anywhere because of the vast client library support, and the very active development team will help catch up on bugs and issues faster.
OpenSearch will likely be less expensive to run, especially if you require more advanced capability, such as a full-fledged SIEM. Those solutions' Elastic Stack implementations are likely to be far more sophisticated but will also come at a high cost.
Curious to learn more about how OpenSearch compares to ElasticSearch in detail? Read this up-to-date comparison of OpenSearch vs. Elasticsearch.