> 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.

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.