Search War: Elasticsearch Vs OpenSearch

Amazon and Elastic's competing Elasticsearch and OpenSearch platforms battle for the crown of best enterprise search and analytics solution. This video explores the history behind the split and the differences between them.
➡️ Elasticsearch
www.elastic.co...
➡️ OpenSearch
opensearch.org/
➡️ Open Distro for Elasticsearch
opendistro.git...
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The Pro Tech Show provides tech, tips, and advice for IT Pros and decision-makers.
#Elasticsarch #OpenSearch

[@markhuston7980]

If only enterprise software companies were half as good at explaining their solutions as you are! Great explainer video!

[@ProTechShow]

Thanks!

[@PaulAtegie]

This was so clear and concise. Great job explaining! This is one of the best explanations I have seen in a while.

[@ProTechShow]

Thanks! 🙂

[@greatmentors391]

What a great explainer. Explained such complicated stuff around licensing so clearly in just 11minutes. Got to learn so much about licensing more than any other resource.

[@ProTechShow]

Thanks!

[@klassica]

As much as I dislike so many of Amazon's business practices, I do find Elastic's nerfing of their sdk/beat clients by blocking connections to OSS implementations of the server software very anti-open. This prevents any open use of ElasticSearch being usable by it's client ecosystem after v7.14.

[@henrikleion9861]

Cloud services aside, if you wanted to run elasticstack in your own premises, the main reason for choosing OpenDistro was that it included security features like role based access, ldap integration and TLS - you know, the bare minimum, whereas the only elastic alternative was to pay for Xpack. For small projects or customers this was not feasible. Without this debacle, elastic would probably never have felt the urge to include these features into their products. So that’s a good thing.

[@ProTechShow]

Trying to make people to pay for authentication was definitely an own goal

[@spacewolfjr]

Elastic wanted $32,000 for Platinum licenses so we could get LDAP for like a 6 node cluster. We would have paid some money for the authentication but not $32,000, it's like Elastic just wanted to squeeze us for as much as possible.

[@1anre]

@@spacewolfjr how many years ago was this?

[@spacewolfjr]

@@1anre Around mid-year 2018

[@pranavsharma8717]

Explanation for this couldn't have been better! Kudos :)

[@ProTechShow]

Thanks!

[@chinesesparrows]

Thanks for this neutral explainer, really informative

[@ProTechShow]

You're welcome!

[@plazmaguy13yago9]

I find myself in elasticsearch's side why do people het mad about the company trying to make money? its not the forst time amazon has undercut competitors

[@ProTechShow]

Nor will it be the last. The Amazon Basics line is a perfect example - let someone else test the market then uncut them once it proves popular.

[@lewiskelly14]

Amazon just seem to become more scummy by the day

[@1anre]

This was very explanatory. Also do a video of tech companies that started out as simple open source projects & went on to list on the stock exchange & become multibillion dollar behemoths

[@ProTechShow]

Thanks!

[@TheodoreRavindranath]

I'm with ES. Open source has to have some conditions to be viable. People have put thousands of hours into it.

[@wildweasel3001]

That is opensource, but AWS are scary happy to compete with their customers. Happened to us too!

[@ProTechShow]

They do play dirty. It's the same on the retail side - they monitor what items are selling well, then bring out their own "Basics" version and undercut the merchants on their own platform.

[@waldowalden7379]

Excellent review! Congratulations on the readiness!

[@ProTechShow]

Thanks!

[@ericleong7079]

5:38 sorry to ask, is this something confirmed by Elastic? I've read the FAQ and it says managed services offering substential access to Elastic feature set is not ok..or am I wrong?

[@ProTechShow]

The FAQ states "You may freely use Elasticsearch inside your SaaS or self-managed application, and redistribute it with your application, provided you follow the three limitations outlined above." www.elastic.co/licensing/elastic-license/faq My summary is that you can't provide Elasticsearch as a managed service without paying, but you can build a product that uses Elasticsearch and offer that (your) product as a managed service. An example: you build a product that stores its own data in Elasticsearch and visualises it using Kibana - that's OK because although your product makes uses of Elastic Stack you are not giving the end-user substantial access to Elastic's products. Counter-example: If your product allowed the user sufficient customisation to store arbitrary data in Elasticsearch or build their own Kibana visualisations then this could be considered substantial access to Elastic's products and at this point they may argue that the product you are providing as a service is in fact Elastic Stack itself. If in doubt, email elastic at [e-mail].

[@ericleong7079]

@@ProTechShow thanks for the reply..really appreciate it. I emailed them few weeks ago but have not received any reply. Hence, I'm turning to Google and KZbin to find insights (or at least some hint of insights) from smart people. You helped alot. Thanks again!

[@sethuramvenkatesh]

Elastic's License should be on the end user's side whereas the AWS benefits from their managed IAAS

[@Zuriki09]

Both companies have the same motivation, money. The thing is, when all the cards were on the table, only Amazon actually chose the open source route. Elastic wants the money and the good will, but doesn't have the fortitude to commit to actually being open source. They are just source available, or "open source with a booby trap". They want their cake and to eat it too. I don't like Amazon, but at least they have so far commited to true FOSS principles, they have a roadmap for setting up an foundation for the OpenSearch project to get it out from under the corporate heel. I don't think "wanting people to develop the software for them" is a fair criticism, isn't the point of OSS exactly that people can choose to contribute and all parties benefit.

[@OzHunter]

They can commit because they are 10, 100x times bigger than Elastic? They are both the same, Amazon just could deal with it because it has a ton more money. Its like saying Amazon is commited to low prices vs say a much smaller retail store. They aren't they just don't need the money right now. Amazon didn't commit because of principles, but because that's how they'll make the most money. Steal the OS community to work for them for free.

[@k225]

You've been reading too much Elasticsearch propaganda! If "XYZ Elasticsearch Service" is trademark infringement, then almost every web hosting company infringes trademarks like WordPress, MySQL, Apache, NGINX, Linux... As long as the core software package identified by the trademark isn't modified, it's not trademark infringement to identify the product. Also, it wouldn't be trademark infringement to denote compatibility like "XYZ Service for Elasticsearch" or "XYZ Elasticsearch-compatible Service" - even if the package was modified.

[@ProTechShow]

Not the same, and Amazon did modify it. The entire point of the open distro was to provide a tweaked version that could do things like authentication without paying Elastic. I can use MySQL and call it MySQL. If I build my own database service from MySQL's code and call my service MySQL then Oracle will sue me for trademark infringement. Another example: various parties have made rebuilds of RHEL - AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, previously CentOS... they can re-use the code but can't call it "Red Hat" because that's trademarked. The "Linux" trademark can be sublicensed because Linus Torvalds allows it, but even so there are rules. This is why Microsoft's WSL is called "Windows Subsystem for Linux" and not "Linux Subsystem for Windows", even though the latter makes more sense.

[@k225]

​@@ProTechShow The distribution (collection) "Open Distro for Elasticsearch" bundled the unmodified core package "Elasticsearch", along with additional packages, modules and plugins. Bundling packages is not modification of a constituent package. Therefore a trademark identifying the origin of a package isn't infringed, provided it isn't identified as origin of the entire collection - hence "Open Distro for Elasticsearch" and not "Elasticsearch Open Distro".

[@ProTechShow]

Yes, but they took that as the basis for their own service, which is no longer the same thing as Elasticsearch, and they called it "Elasticsearch". That's what got them in trouble.

[@gl4989]

The choice is clear when one would cost millions in licensing fees and the other is "free"

[@prajwalgaikwad10]

Was bit confused thanks for the explanation. 🤓

[@ProTechShow]

Glad it helped with the confusion!

[@wdeath]

shame on amazon

[@zed5000]

you got a really nice channel here.

[@ProTechShow]

Thank you 🙂

[@illiapotapov9939]

I guess I'll go with Solr

[@narniashasta]

Great video to sort out the mess. I eventually chose OpenSearch for my project as it's just easy to use an AWS service, although I don't like the way Amazon as the bigger guy just infringed ElasticSearch's trademark bluntly and did not even want to give a proper apology at the very beginning.

[@ProTechShow]

Thanks!

[@EmSixTeen]

Cheers for the video, good insight.

[@ProTechShow]

You're welcome 🙂

[@kevinz1991]

Phenomenal video. Subscribed.

[@ProTechShow]

Cheers!

[@CarlosSuarezFontalvo]

Loved the explanation, thanks a lot

[@ProTechShow]

Thanks!

[@shacharh5470]

Conditional open source has been a thing since the introduction of copyleft in the 1980's, don't pretend like it's some new hideous subvertion of open source principles

[@arek121281]

It's shows big problem that open source is orphan. People work doesn't matter.

[@thun03]

Excellent video. Thank you.

[@ProTechShow]

Thanks 🙂

[@stephenpaek9175]

Valuable video, thank you

[@ProTechShow]

Thanks

[@nardixplorer6283]

how about u? are u team elastic? or opensearch?

[@ProTechShow]

Haha - good question! I don't write my own search applications so when I come across theses two it is inevitably as a prerequisite for something else. This puts me on team "Whatever the vendor needs to make the application work!" 🙂

[@hejjbdhfg-i5j]

Elasticsearch is nowhere near "billions of dollars" on AWS

[@ProTechShow]

Didn't say it was. I said that huge corporations are making billions off the back of open source code. I don't know how much AWS made from Elasticsearch, specifically.

[@danieljost5881]

Quality vid man

[@ProTechShow]

Cheers!

[@emmanuelgelatimesa2712]

Thanks for this good video :)

[@ProTechShow]

You're welcome 🙂

[@JohnSmith-oj3uu]

Linux Centos (free) vs Redhat (paid) - So many vendors use Linux at no cost. Why is this any different? I thought Opensource was not about the money. AWS is charging for the hardware and the management of its backend. Elasticsearch needs to be competitive with its managed offering and API integration. Like Redhat and other vendors who you pay for support.

[@OzHunter]

Hard to be competitive when your competitor can subsidize prices. It is exactly what Uber did for so long. The idea of being competitive is fine as long as you don't do shitty practices to fake having the results of being more competitive.

[@bougeurraelouanes1594]

what about apache solr , at least mention it

[@ProTechShow]

I'm covering Elasticsearch and OpenSearch specifically because Elastic's is the most widely used platform and Amazon's is a fork intended to overthrow it with a compatible replacement. Solr doesn't really fit into that story. It's another Lucene-based search platform but I'm not trying to provide a comparison of every platform in this video, just the two butting heads for the same customers.

[@bougeurraelouanes1594]

@@ProTechShow as a solr user i just don't like it when you start with "if you wanted an open source enterprise search and analytical platform" and you didn't mention it. as for elasticsearch it is build on top of lucene also )in his search functionality). and thanks for the video.

[@ProTechShow]

@@bougeurraelouanes1594 I see your point - the phrasing could imply there aren't other options. The words "probably" or "most likely" might have worked better in the sentence. Thanks for the feedback.

[@LjaDj5XQKey9mSDxh4]

Waw that's dirty

[@johnrobie9694]

Really good until that "fair share in taxes" nonsense. Lost a lot of credibility with that.

[@ProTechShow]

Glad you enjoyed the video, but if you think it's morally acceptable that workers pissing in bottles because they're not allowed a break have a basic tax rate of 20% (rising to 40% for higher earners and 45% beyond that - UK figures) while the billionaire at the top pays less than 1% and the company itself achieves a tax-to-turnover rate of 0.37% then your idea of credibility isn't very attractive to me.

[@jesusisc0mings00n3]

​@@ProTechShow lol well said. Unfortunately, politicians clamouring fair share here in the US, do NOTHING when they get elected. It is just a false campaign promise. 10% across the board would be great! I hate paying taxes as much as the next guy, but it would alleviate so many problems.

[@hugodotplayer]

and you think Amazon won't do the same? just look at Google. Doing the same shit. Amazon is just mad it got beaten at their game

[@ProTechShow]

I don't think Amazon will do the same because Amazon makes money from the cloud hosting, not the software. It's in their best interests to have as many people as possible using (and contributing to) OpenSearch because it increases the pool of potential customers to sell their cloud services to.

[@hugodotplayer]

@@ProTechShow amazon doesn't make money from anything, why do you think bezos pays no taxes? because he makes no revenue and the revenue goes back into investment. But supposed you are right and that amazon has the best interests in opensearch, why would anyone be contributing to their code base when they just rebranded the old stack from elastic as their own? stop believing in tech companies

[@ProTechShow]

AWS generated over $80,000,000,000 last year, nearly $23,000,000,000 of which was operating profit. I'd say they're making money. As to why people might contribute to Opensearch? Ask them: opensearch.org/partners/ github.com/opensearch-project/OpenSearch/graphs/contributors Stop believing your own conspiracy theories.

[@nojerome497]

​@@ProTechShowthat response was pure gold