[mrkstu]

Free, not open source version. Obviously a reaction to Amazon's fork- not wanting to give them any code to pull into their version.

It will be interesting to see if this is enough to retain the majority of the userbase or if we'll still see a majority migrate to the 'Open Distro' fork.

[jillesvangurp]

Open distro is definitely creating some pressure on ES. However, there are some misconceptions on what that is.

1) Amazon did not actually fork elasticsearch or maintains any patches against it.

2) Elasticsearch does in fact provide completely OSS distributions and docker images for their products.

3) Amazon has created several OSS plugins for Elasticsearch that they bundle with their open distro that compete directly with what Elasticsearch does in their non OSS add-ons to their product.

So, obviously Elasticsearch is responding to Amazon by ensuring there's little functional gap with the stuff you get for free.

I'd argue most new users are still better off on elastic cloud vs amazon's hosted version of their distro and should not be attempting to run this themselves. I've used both and would pick elastic cloud every time for the simple reason of being more reliable and easy to deal with (e.g. backups, upgrades, cluster topology changes, etc.). Also, it seems they are quite competitive on price/performance.

For reference, we pay about 170 Euro a month for a simple setup that takes care of all our logging (couple of GB worth of logs / day). I'd hate running blind without that. IMHO at those prices, self hosting is not worth the effort (devops time required to do it would pay for several years of hosting).

[jjeaff]

Regarding the docker images elastic provides, I find it odd that they are only hosted from their own servers (rather than docker hub) and I have looked all over the place to find the dockerfile they use to create those images.

It seems that they are hiding that info and it really locks you into only doing customizations that the docker image is directly built for.

I also don't like to pull images blindly. I generally fork the dockerfile source so that I can build the software from source and have a bit more control and knowledge of what I am installing.

[jillesvangurp]

After 1 google search: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr...

It includes a deep link straight into their repository right at the top: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/tree/7.1/distributi...

In short, their Docker build process is part of the elasticsearch repository. So, it's actually part of their normal build process and not something that happens with a separate build in some different repository. Personally, I think this is a good practice.

That's for both the OSS and non OSS images. They produce these with every build. And they probably test them too, which I think is the responsible thing to do and something I'd expect from them.

They use gradle to build their docker images from a Docker file (https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/7.1/distributi...) that essentially untars the tar ball produced by their build. This looks pretty straightforward and free of magic steps.

So, read the source. It's all there. You can build from source or do your own thing. A variant of their Docker file where you just wget their tar ball shouldn't be that hard to do.

[timv]

Dockerfiles from v6.6 onwards are available at https://github.com/elastic/dockerfiles

[yehosef]

The features of the open distro are not enough to compare to the Elastic offerings. I think most are smart enough to see through Amazon's "generosity" and know that they (Amazon) are not a bastion of OSS.

[noname120]

Could you expand on the features that Open Distro misses and that Elastic offers?

[yehosef]

You can see the OSS and Free offerings at https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions. Real question is what are the Open Distro is offering:

* Alerting - you can use ElasticAlert

* Security - Search Guard

* SQL - https://github.com/NLPchina/elasticsearch-sql

There very little reason (IMO) for users to a choose "Open Distro" except that it comes as an AWS image.

[noname120]

Maybe a real reason is that it's precisely a distro which means it contains features and reasonable defaults so that users don't need to learn about them, install them, and configure them.

Basically same debate as between Linux From Scratch and a full-featured distro such as Ubuntu.

[mrkstu]

Also note that you'll want to go to the features page and hit the disclosure triangle on the 'Security' feature. This is very much a subset of their security features- no IP filtering, AD/LDAP integration, SAML or many other security oriented features.

https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions

[lol768]

I'm actually okay with these more enterprise features still being premium. Basic RBAC, TLS support and user management should've been core from the start for free, though.

[jka]

Good catch and an important distinction.

Some background here:

https://devclass.com/2019/03/12/aws-launches-elasticsearch-d...

[dhd415]

To be fair, the Docker Hub stats for the Open Distro for ES image don't show a very large shift away the Elastic ES image. And I doubt Amazon really cares about that, either. This is about whether their hosted ES service remains competitive with Elastic's hosted ES service.

[glloydell]

Totally agree. Amazon had to do something after Elastic changed their license terms specifically to stop Amazon from competing with their own hosted service.

I'm interested to see what Elastics next move will be.

grabs popcorn

[pmart123]

Do you have a good understanding of the legal differences? My understanding is there now an open source license that anyone can fork, including companies basically committing IP theft, and then a basic license that is free unless you are selling Elastic as a service? The idea is that Elastic would put all improvements into Elastic Basic, and Amazon can't use this source code in its forked version?

IMO, it doesn't seem like a near-term risk, but could Elastic ever change its basic license so it costs money for everyone?

[chelmzy]

I was under the impression that they already opened the code for X-Pack features.

[lol768]

Were these features licensed in such a way that you could freely use them, though? Or was it 'open' as in "you can see the code" but it's not FOSS?

[javagram]

x-pack is not FOSS which is why amazon can’t use it.

[lol768]

As I thought - thanks for confirming.

[Jedd]

Refer this thread from 2018-02 when the X-Pack licensing change was announced:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16487440

Summary -- vague use of the word 'open' and exclusive use of free in the beer sense, led to some significant angst about what this means for end users.