OpenSearchCon: Together after 18 Months

OpenSearch was created by the community for the community to continue to keep an open-source alternative to ElasticSearch and Kibana. The project has been hard at work for the last 1.5 years building, launching and iterating on this important initiative. Some remarkable milestones have been achieved, including over 5,800 stars on GitHub with 19 different community-led projects. 

Eli Fisher (lead product manager for open source OpenSearch) also pointed out OpenSearch is in the top 5 search engines for DB engine rankings (DB-Engines Ranking – popularity ranking of search engines). 

As one of the main contributors and founders of the project, we were thrilled to have been included in the OpenSearchCon (OpenSearchCon 2022 – Splash (splashthat.com)) keynote. I spoke for 15 minutes about how the project has had an impact on our business here at Logz.io.

We have made several contributions to the project, and we are most excited about the vision of unified observability in OpenSearch. It would also be wonderful to see OpenSearch move from an AWS-led project into a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project when it makes sense for the team. I appreciate being included in the event, and we are eagerly awaiting taking an active role in the event for 2023, where I am sure the attendance will be twice the size. 

The event took place on the 21st of September 2022 where over 250 avid OpenSearch fans and contributors gathered in Seattle at Fremont Studios. Yes, it was a real studio:

Key Takeaways from OpenSearchCon

The event content was wide-ranging from how the project operates, the internals of OpenSearch and Lucene, machine learning, observability, and site search. Some of my personal favorites:

• Lennart Koopmann on using OpenSearch machine learning for security anomaly detection. He went deep into his particular use cases to drive the capabilities in Graylog. 
• Nicholas Knize is one of the engineering leaders of OpenSearch, he also is a maintainer for Apache Lucene, which is the engine under OpenSearch. He went very deep into the codebase and explained how these two projects work with one another. He also went into the plugin architecture and some areas for improvement in the projects.
• There has been some great work done on the OpenSearch Kubernetes operator. There are many contributors and those working on building a robust solution for running OpenSearch on Kubernetes. This is something we’ll be looking into for next year. Ziv Segal, a former Logz.io-er, has been leading this effort along with the team at Opster. Great to see this maturing. 
• Some great contributions have also been made by the team at Aiven, who have several OpenSearch maintainers. We heard about some new capabilities to manage concurrency and merge policies to speed up very busy clusters. Great talk by Andriy Redko. 
• Finally, we heard a lot about the current and future roadmap plans from senior Software Development Manager Charlotte Henkle. She is tirelessly working to manage the engineering resources from Amazon working across the various parts of the OpenSearch project.

Thanks to all the speakers and these great talks, I really enjoyed all of these.

The videos should be posted soon on YouTube, so pay attention to OpenSearch for the latest news. They will be added to this playlist. 

The project is continually looking for additional contributors and collaborators. You can use the Forums for questions, and please join the meetup group to get the latest weekly meetings at the OpenSearch Meetup page . 

Keeping up with the project is easy, as you can also see what’s coming up next in 3.0 and beyond in the public roadmap OpenSearch Project Roadmap (github.com).

I hope to see more of you all at the conference next year!