I see this as a net positive (https://xkcd.com/927/ notwithstanding): Elastic.co, imo, has iron-grip (in terms of licensing and features that it builds) on XPack and Elasticsearch. This incredible technology that rode on OSS wave is increasingly controlled by a for-profit organization that also acts like one. This is very similar to how Google dealt with numerous forks of Android by essentially moving key pieces to GooglePlayServices and other closed-source apps in addition to responding with shutting out manufacturers and SoC providers that weren't OHA signatories [0][1]. Amazon felt the burnt of that [2].

Apart from including/forking other community plugin projects (elasticsearch-sql, SearchGuardSSL) in open-distro [3], AWS seems to be investing to make this more "cloud-native", as well: This observation comes from PerformanceAnalyzer (released) and IndexStateManagement (request-for-comment).

- IndexStateManagement [4] is simply "never send a human to do a machine's job" automation of common yet frequent tasks required to keep elasticsearch humming along. If used in conjunction with AWS's/GCP's/Azure's managed-cloud offering, this feature might be an amazing sell for a lot of enterprises that want to set up things and have them running with as few dev-ops/engs as they can.

- PerformanceAnalyzer [5] could track multiple signals from servers running open-distro and may perform reactionary actions to either shed load, throttle requests, shift workload and so on, something similar to what MeltWater did [6].

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2009/12/22/google-open-when-convenien...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/16/amazon-se...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19361234

[4] https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/index-manage...

[5] https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch-docs/docs/pa/...

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18413862