OpenSearch Expands Leadership Beyond AWS

The OpenSearch project has achieved another milestone, launching the inaugural OpenSearch Leadership Committee, in December 2023. The committee is another step toward open governance in which a broad community of users, contributors, and committers is included in a publicly visible and accessible process that determines an open source project’s direction. Open governance creates a clearly defined path toward leadership and ensures that anyone can participate and bring their ideas and changes to the project. The broader and more diverse a project’s participation, the faster it innovates, the more secure and resilient it is, and the more sustainable it becomes as it is less reliant on any one individual or organization.

OpenSearch and the OpenSearch Dashboard initially started as an Apache 2.0-licensed project out of AWS in 2021 based on the previously open source versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana. But open source software is more than a license, it’s a community. The goal with OpenSearch has always been to establish a community-led open source analytics suite. It’s been an amazing journey for the project to get to this point with over 320 million downloads, more than 70 partners, 115 repositories, and 227 maintainers at the end of 2023. It’s ready to expand beyond AWS to include project leadership that represents a more diverse set of members.

The new leadership committee is comprised of maintainers, repository owners, product developers, engineers, developer advocates and companies using the product. The committee members are: Anandhi Bumstead (AWS), Mark Cohen (AWS), Eli Fisher (AWS), Kris Freedain (AWS), Charlotte Henkle (AWS), Samuel Herman (Oracle), Grant Ingersoll (Develomentor), Nicholas Knize (AWS), Jonah Kowall (Aiven), Andriy Redko (Aiven), Nithya Ruff (Amazon), Mehul A. Shah (Aryn.ai), and Amitai Stern (Logz.io). As open source projects look to maintain longevity, establishing genuine rapport within the community is crucial for success.

“The OpenSearch Project aims to create a successful, open source search and analytics software suite that is rich in features, widely used, and supported by a vibrant community. Since the beginning of OpenSearch, the project strives to find the best ways to work together and give all stakeholders a voice in decision making”, Anandhi Bumstead, AWS, Director of Engineering in OpenSearch, affirms when asked to describe the community and future of the open source project. “Governance is a key aspect of the OpenSearch Project, as we seek to grow our open source community beyond AWS members and leverage the power of open source innovation for the OpenSearch Project.”

AWS is an avid advocate of the OpenSearch project. We continue to make substantial investments to support and contribute to the project, including a team of dedicated engineers and marketers. We would like to acknowledge the project’s continual dedication to build transparent practices and connecting the community. The OpenSearch team has been intentional with implementation of practices which nurture the sentiment that the open source project is for the community and by the community. The project is still early in its journey, and will depend on its users and contributors to define its next phase.

What is OpenSearch?

OpenSearch is a distributed, community-driven, fully open source search and analytics suite. Built-in security, scalable capacity and performance, and support for high availability help make OpenSearch a solid foundation for enterprise-grade applications across search, observability, security analytics, and more.

OpenSearch is committed to raising standards for the broader community as highlighted on the AWS Open Source Security webpage and with transparency for open releases and most recently open governance. Governance has been front and center for the OpenSearch Project in their goal to expand its open source community beyond AWS members and drive an open source-based flywheel for the OpenSearch Project. Over the last 2 years, they have taken several steps to increase transparency and open governance. This includes: 1) adding support for external maintainers in May ‘22 2) starting a new community Slack workspace that is open to anyone in the community 3) opening up their release process so the external maintainers and committers can participate, 4) raising standards on security and creating a process for reporting and managing security issues including a pre-disclosure list, and 5) holding bi-weekly community meetings to discuss designs, triage roadmap items, prioritize issues, and more.