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.
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).
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.
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.
* 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.
Basically same debate as between Linux From Scratch and a full-featured distro such as Ubuntu.
Some background here:
https://devclass.com/2019/03/12/aws-launches-elasticsearch-d...
I'm interested to see what Elastics next move will be.
grabs popcorn
IMO, it doesn't seem like a near-term risk, but could Elastic ever change its basic license so it costs money for everyone?
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.