Rationale​

OpenSearch is an open-source search engine forked from ElasticSearch that came as a response to some licensing issues Amazon had with Elastic, the original developers.

• It is maintained by AWS and a community of developers.
• It enables full-text search over indexed data with a flexible API.
• It is a SaaS-oriented, so it does not require managing infrastructure on our own.
• It supports local deployments, enabling us to run it on our machines, which is especially useful for development and ephemeral environments.
• All its settings can be written as code using Terraform.

Alternatives​

• ElasticSearch (on AWS): Not recommended as the last supported version before the license change is 7.10, which is quite old now.
• ElasticSearch (on Elastic Cloud): It implies using a different cloud provider with its own pricing model for very little extra features compared to what's available with OpenSearch.

Usage​

We use OpenSearch for powering search and filtering features in our platform.