OpenSearch slowly steps out of AWS's shadow five years after Elasticsearch fork

Amazon Web Services announced OpenSearch in January 2021, after Elastic moved Elasticsearch and its visualization tool Kibana from the Apache 2.0 license to a combination of proprietary and source-available licenses. Elastic said at the time it wanted to prevent cloud providers such as AWS from offering Elasticsearch "as a service" without giving anything back, and accused AWS of violating the Elasticsearch trademark. Elastic later added the AGPL as a licensing option, making up with AWS, while OpenSearch continued on its own path.

In September 2024, AWS transferred the project to the Linux Foundation, establishing the OpenSearch Software Foundation under "vendor-neutral" governance. Two years on, AWS's share of contribution activities across the project's repositories has fallen from 91% in its first year to 72% in 2025-26, according to figures provided to The New Stack. Amazon-affiliated engineers accounted for 95% of maintainers in the core repository in April 2022, versus 71% today.

Deployments are shifting as well. In the 2026 Open Data Infrastructure Report, published last month by the Linux Foundation and the OpenSearch Software Foundation, 60% of surveyed OpenSearch users run self-managed deployments in the cloud, up from 37% in 2024, while use of Amazon's managed service rose from 44% to 48%.

The association with AWS remains a barrier for some. Nearly a quarter of 71 non-adopters surveyed, 24%, cited concerns about the project's vendor neutrality and historical ties to AWS as reasons for staying away. AWS still accounts for nearly three-quarters of recorded contribution activity, holds four of 15 voting seats on the Technical Steering Committee, and an AWS employee, Andrew Ross, was reelected committee chair in October.

Bianca Lewis, executive director of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, whom The New Stack interviewed at Open Source Summit Europe in Prague this month, said the project's legal independence matters. “When they donated it to the Linux Foundation, that was a watershed moment,” she told The New Stack. AWS could no longer close OpenSearch or change its license, and no longer owned the application, she said. She also suggested the donation made commercial sense. “AWS don't make money from applications. AWS make money from compute. So operating, growing OpenSearch long term was never in AWS's plan,” she said.

The software has also changed. Lewis acknowledged early versions were Elasticsearch under a different name, but said the project had already “well and truly diverged” by the time of the donation. OpenSearch now positions itself as infrastructure for AI applications, with vector and hybrid search support relevant to retrieval-augmented generation. The latest release, OpenSearch 3.9, debuted in September with improvements aimed at helping developers search and retrieve information for AI applications, alongside updates to performance, monitoring and alerting. “If you decide that you wanted your AI infrastructure on an open platform, I think [OpenSearch] today is just the default choice,” she said.

Still, the foundation's report shows a substantial proportion of deployments remain experimental, and there is no guarantee evaluations become permanent. Lewis pointed to multiyear contracts. “They might have a three-year contract for Splunk, a license for five years with Elastic. So they're not just chucking that out,” she said. Her stated ambition is “a truly sustainable, fast, innovating platform, which is not dominated or heavily influenced by any single vendor in the world.”