This is a good project to happen, and kudos to AWS for doing this! However, like some in the thread, I suspect AWS has been building this for a while for their own product and Elastic's license change may have influenced the decision to open-source.

Getting a good out-of-the-box granular security has been a long overdue pain point with ElasticSearch, there have been good alternatives for the other problems it is replicating.

1.) ElastAlert - https://github.com/yelp/elastalert for alerting, 2.) ElasticSearch SQL - https://github.com/NLPchina/elasticsearch-sql for writing SQL queries.

Would very much like to hear from OP why these weren't contributed to instead of creating another alternative.

We've been working on a similar project in Golang and now well may be as good a day to open-source and put it out there: https://github.com/appbaseio/arc. It's an extremely light-weight API gateway for ElasticSearch that at the core comes with an out-of-the-box security system based on users and permissions (set granular ACLs, Rate Limits, TTL) inspired from a proprietary security system we built over the past year - https://appbase.io/features/security/.