OpenSearch is an open-source (ASL 2.0) 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.
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.
OpenSearch is often used for a variety of use-cases, including Log Analytics, Security Analytics, Vector Search and more.
OpenSearch Use Cases
E-Commerce Search
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.
Vector Search
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.