Interesting move of amazon, setting up a new elasticsearch community called ‘open distro for elasticsearch’: Since March this year, a new flavor of elasticsearch is available. This version is free and includes ‘enterprise-level’ security features with backend authentication, job scheduling and performance montioring.
Who saw the business case in providing a new free solution for a search engine next to Solr and elasticsearch. Amazon has made this bold move… Taking the open-source elasticsearch version (which has less features than the base free elasticsearch version) and adding the major missing features that makes it enterprise friendly, for free.
As it’s now active for a few months now, we can see that amazon is not showing regrets… The release train seems to be in place (following the releases of elasticsearch quite quickly, even with the recent new major version of elasticsearch 7) and new features are being worked upon quite intensively.
As providers of search solutions, we believe this is an offering ‘to be aware of’ at least. Customers should add this option in their search for the most appropriate search engine for their use case. Of course, search-solutions.net is happy to help with expert advice related to open source search solutions.
More info related to the release by amazon can be found on https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-open-distro-for-elasticsearch/. The Open Distro itself is hosted on https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/.