Just look at the the github repo activity between elastic and opensearch. Overwhelmingly, elastic is doing 100x better. AWS doesn't care as much as elastic about these products.
Give em some time to grow.
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.
If I had to make a short list. Data streams, index lifecycle management and security on top of the OSS distribution of ES is all I need to view and manage K8S pod logs.
Worth noting that the developers of searchguard which the Opensearch / Opendistro security plugin is based on is also being sued by Elastic.
Huh, didn't know that. I really doubt their "threat" is in any way comparable to AWS. This really doesn't help whatever goodwill they had left...