OpenSearch is an open-source search and analytics suite developers use to build solutions for various applications, including search, data observability, data ingestion, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), vector databases, and more.
It’s designed for scalability and offers powerful full-text search capabilities, supporting both structured and unstructured data. Over time, OpenSearch has evolved into a standalone platform, distinguished by its unique features and capabilities.
Keep reading for a deep dive into all things OpenSearch.
What Is OpenSearch?
OpenSearch is an open-source search technology that allows organizations and developers to build and deploy their own search engines. It provides a flexible and scalable framework for creating search solutions tailored to specific needs. OpenSearch is designed to be transparent, customizable, and community-driven, and it builds upon the work of Elasticsearch, one of the most popular search and analytics engines in the world.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads the OpenSearch initiative. Since the OpenSearch Project is community-driven, new features and innovations are constantly proposed and developed to meet the ever-changing search needs.
How Is OpenSearch Licensed?
OpenSearch is an open-source product with an Apache 2.0 license. It’s a great solution for product teams that don’t want to bother about complying with licensing requirements in Elasticsearch 7.10.2 and later versions.
OpenSearch Benefits
Advanced Analytics
OpenSearch offers advanced analytics capabilities, allowing enterprises to analyze enormous amounts of data in real time. This is useful for tracking trends, gathering corporate intelligence, and making data-driven decisions.
The Versatility Of Open-Source
OpenSearch is an open-source project that allows you to customize and extend the program to meet your specific business needs without incurring license fees. This promotes a community-driven approach to development and innovation.
Compatibility and Integration
OpenSearch is compatible with various data sources and can work with multiple tools and platforms to process search requests. This interoperability allows you to integrate OpenSearch into your existing technological stack easily.
Key OpenSearch Features
Open Source
OpenSearch is released under the Apache 2.0 open-source license, meaning it's freely available and can be customized and extended by anyone.
Scalability
OpenSearch is built to handle large volumes of data and queries, making it suitable for various applications, from e-commerce websites to data analytics and enterprise search.
High Performance
Thanks to features like distributed search, index sharding, and in-memory caching, it is designed to deliver fast and accurate search results.
Security
OpenSearch provides robust security features, including role-based access control, encryption, and authentication options to protect sensitive data.
Customization
With a growing ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and integrations, OpenSearch can be tailored to meet diverse use cases and requirements.
Community-Driven
The project is developed and maintained by the OpenSearch community of contributors, ensuring continuous improvement and a broad range of expertise.
OpenSearch Use Cases
Search Engine
Indexing is the technique by which search engines organize material for speedy retrieval, resulting in a structure known as an index. In OpenSearch, the fundamental data unit is a JSON document, and each document within an index is assigned a unique ID.
The Index State Management (ISM) plugin improves OpenSearch's indexing capabilities. This plugin automates routine administrative duties by initiating operations based on the index's age, size, or document count. The plugin allows you to establish policies that automatically manage index rollovers and deletions based on your requirements.
E-Commerce
Online retailers can use OpenSearch to power their product search engines, delivering relevant results and a superior shopping experience to customers.
Enterprise Search
Large organizations can create powerful internal search engines to facilitate document and knowledge retrieval within their databases.
OpenSearch Dashboards
OpenSearch Dashboards is an open-source, integrated visualization tool that allows users to visualize data and explore their OpenSearch results. Like Elasticsearch and Kibana, it graphically displays trends, outliers, and patterns in data for real-time application monitoring, threat detection, incident management, and personalized search.
Vector Database
Using OpenSearch as a vector database allows you to combine traditional search, analytics, and vector search in a single solution. OpenSearch's vector database capabilities have the potential to accelerate the development of AI by serving as a knowledge repository. It can be used for various purposes, including semantic and multimodal search.
Analytics and Machine Learning
OpenSearch Dashboards – the visualization and analytics platform that is part of the OpenSearch project – can be used in various analytics solutions, including events analytics, trace analytics, and machine learning, which uses methods like anomaly detection and data clustering.
Observability
OpenSearch Dashboards allows you to construct observability applications, schedule, export, and distribute reports, and monitor and analyze system logs and events in real time, ensuring the health and security of IT systems.
Security
OpenSearch can be used in security information and event management (SIEM) solutions to investigate, detect, analyze, and respond to security risks that threaten the success of enterprises and organizations and their online operations.
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.