OpenSearch Gains Ground Beyond AWS as Foundation Seeks Vendor-Neutral Future

OpenSearch has gained traction beyond Amazon Web Services since its transfer to the Linux Foundation in September 2024, according to foundation figures and a new report. AWS still accounts for most contribution activity, but its share has fallen and self-managed deployments have grown faster than Amazon's managed service. Executive director Bianca Lewis says the project's legal independence was a watershed moment, while acknowledging that winning enterprise trust will take time.

From Elasticsearch fork to independent project

AWS announced OpenSearch in January 2021 after Elastic moved Elasticsearch and Kibana away from Apache 2.0 to proprietary and source-available licenses. Elastic said it wanted to stop cloud providers such as AWS from offering Elasticsearch as a service without contributing back, and it accused AWS of trademark violation. Elastic later returned Elasticsearch and Kibana to open source by adding AGPL as an option, but OpenSearch continued as its own project.

The project reached a major milestone in September 2024, when AWS transferred it to the Linux Foundation and the OpenSearch Software Foundation was established. The move was meant to give other companies confidence that they could contribute without AWS retaining ultimate control.

AWS influence is declining but remains large

Figures provided to The New Stack by the foundation show AWS's share of contribution activities across project repositories fell from 91 percent in its first year to 72 percent in 2025-26. Amazon-affiliated engineers accounted for 95 percent of maintainers in the core OpenSearch repository in April 2022, compared with 71 percent today.

The 2026 Open Data Infrastructure Report, published last month by the Linux Foundation and the OpenSearch Software Foundation, says self-managed deployments have grown faster than Amazon's managed OpenSearch Service since 2024. Sixty percent of surveyed OpenSearch users now run self-managed deployments in the cloud, up from 37 percent in 2024, while use of Amazon's managed service rose from 44 percent to 48 percent.

Yet AWS's historical association remains an obstacle. Nearly a quarter, or 24 percent, of 71 surveyed non-adopters cite concerns about vendor neutrality and historical ties to AWS. AWS still accounts for nearly three quarters of recorded contribution activities, holds four of 15 voting seats on the Technical Steering Committee, and AWS employee Andrew Ross was reelected committee chair in October.

AI search and enterprise adoption

OpenSearch now positions itself as infrastructure for applications that search, analyze and retrieve data, including those built around large language models. Its support for vector and hybrid search makes it relevant to retrieval-augmented generation, where AI applications retrieve information from external sources. OpenSearch 3.9, released in September, builds on those capabilities with improvements aimed at helping developers search and retrieve information for AI applications, alongside updates to performance, monitoring and alerting.

Lewis argues that if organizations want AI infrastructure on an open platform, OpenSearch is today the default choice. She also says enterprise adoption takes time because companies may be tied to multiyear licenses for products such as Splunk or Elastic. Some deployments remain experimental, and there is no guarantee evaluations become permanent. Lewis says the freedom to change technology providers without rebuilding applications is one reason organizations may eventually switch.

What comes next

Lewis says she hopes that in five years OpenSearch will be a sustainable, fast, innovating platform not dominated or heavily influenced by any single vendor. She says such independence would create a stable platform.

Sources: The New Stack