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I would disagree here. AWS has to be strong out of the gate to push opensearch as more than just "elasticsearch, but on AWS". Elastic has proven its worth, or this fight wouldn't even be happening. AWS is simultaneously David and Goliath in this fight - they obviously won't have ES' newest, coolest features immediately, but companies will sign up with them instead of Elastic if it means they get good-enough software at a reasonable pace. Elastic's playbook is almost diametrically opposed to this: they need to prove that they're worth paying a premium for, over AWS' offering. The repo activity clearly shows that they're working on more stuff, building faster, whatever signals you want to glean from that. Change is happening, and if it's good change I can see the gambit AWS is pushing turn into a losing proposition. The endgame for Elastic is a partnership on AWS, on "equal" terms; license fees, a cut of the profits, the whole shebang. The endgame for AWS is an end to Elastic as a company, but not heavily increased profits one way or another - AWS still gets its cut if Elastic succeeds. The incentive models aren't equal here, and that's what kills AWS' agenda. I'm not affiliated with either company, so I don't have any inside info, but I have to imagine that Elastic will succeed here in carving out a niche for themselves - unless there's been a silent exodus from the company I understand that these are smart folks building software under, shall we say, extrenuous motivational circumstances. A little stress is good for productivity :) |
As an Elastic customer managing my own cluster, the main issue I have with their approach, and the main reason I'm tempted to switch to OpenSearch, is their all-or-nothing license model.
We only use ES as a place to centralize logs, look them up, maybe whip up a dashboard now and then. No fancy ML or what have you. We don't (yet?) care for those. But we also need access control. There's no such thing in the free version, so we have to pay up quite a hefty sum. We could also get by with 3 data nodes. Tough. Minimum is five. We'd really like it to have some kind of SSO, like pretty much all our other apps. We'd have to pay up even more.
So yeah, we'd be getting all kinds of ML-laden features and whatever. So what? Those bring 0 value to us today.
So my thinking is, what if OpenSearch doesn't have the latest and greatest features? Aside from a few things around snapshot management, I was never really interested in those. Plus the license premium is so huge compared to our usage, we could just be spinning a tad bigger VMs and keep everything on-line.
I wonder how many clients like us they are alienating with, what looks to me, a petty war. But as someone said on some other threads on this subject, Elastic isn't a mom-and-pop company, so our annual license costs are probably pocket change for them.