OpenSearch slowly steps out of AWS's shadow five years after Elasticsearch fork
Foundation figures show AWS's share of contributions and maintainers falling, but a quarter of non-adopters still cite vendor neutrality doubts
Five years after Amazon Web Services announced OpenSearch in response to Elastic's licensing shift, the open source search project is slowly stepping out of its creator's shadow: AWS's share of contribution activities and the proportion of core-repository maintainers affiliated with Amazon have fallen, while data suggest self-managed deployments have grown faster than Amazon's managed service since 2024, foundation figures show.