Amazon has updated its Elasticsearch service to embrace a new branch

Amazon recently released several enhancements to the Amazon Elasticsearch Service. These new features come from two different sources. Elasticsearch is a long-term project associated with the service, and Open Distro for Elasticsearch is a new branch. Amazon and other companies created the branch earlier this year in response to licensing changes Elastic made.

The most notable update to The Amazon Elasticsearch service is asynchronous search. This API enables users to execute certain queries that would otherwise time out. The product documentation shows that asynchronous search is useful for searching large datasets and querying data stored on less expensive hardware. Users who perform wildcard searches are also likely to see better results.

Amazon’s new asynchronous search feature is interesting for another reason: its origins. Elastic released the asynchronous search API nearly a year ago as part of the X-Pack, a set of features released under an Elastic license. Since this code is not subject to the Apache 2.0 license, Amazon cannot easily bundle this asynchronous search code. Instead, the company has adopted the API That Open Distro publishes for Elasticsearch. Comparing this functionality of the Open Distro API with the Elastic API shows the implementation differences.

Amazon plans to rename Amazon Elasticsearch Service to Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Elastic includes asynchronous search in its commercial products. The feature is available “free and open” under an Elastic license. Elastic acknowledges that Elastic license is not an OSI-approved license.

In a separate announcement, Amazon detailed its support for Elasticsearch 7.10. Users can create new domains based on version 7.10 and upgrade existing domains to the new version.

In a blog post announcing the license change, Elastic said version 7.10 is the final release of Elasticsearch under the Apache 2.0 license. As a result, amazon will most likely turn to Open Distro for Elasticsearch as a source of future business improvements. Elastic released Elasticsearch version 7.10 in November 2020.

In addition to Amazon’s Elasticsearch, users can choose from several cloud-managed versions. Elastic offers managed versions of Elasticsearch on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud platforms. Here, users can choose to deploy the latest versions of the service, specifically 7.12.0 and 7.11.2. There is a 14-day free trial. Practitioners can also deploy Instances of Elastic management on Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces. There are caveats to this approach, because Elastic provides files for Microsoft and Google clients. There are also self-managed versions on the market for all three.

Amazon Updates Its Elasticsearch Service, Begins to Embrace of New Fork