Comment by sdesol
4 years ago
Will be interesting to see the resources that AWS will throw at this. You can get a sense of the resource that elastic.co is throwing at elasticsearch at
https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?r=gith...
I'm currently indexing the fork, so in about an hour or two, I'll provide the insights for the fork as well.
I scrolled back through the commits. It looks like they've been removing traces of x-pack, Elastic branding, licensing checks, etc. since the beginning of March. So far it looks like one person is doing the bulk of all that work.
If there are new features, I haven't seen any. The real question is do they have a team for new feature work that they are putting together or is this just a fork that is doomed to fall behind as Elastic's huge team continues to develop their code base fixing bugs that will never get fixed on the Amazon fork, adding features that will never get fixed, eventually releasing the 8.0 release that has been in the works for two years, etc.
I don't see any evidence that they have that team so far. They're paying a few people to go through the moves of forking but I don't really see a grand vision beyond that so far.
I really need to add a compare feature to my tool as it would make analysis a lot easier. Having said that, there is no denying there is a huge difference in work being done in both projects over the past 30 days.
Amazon does have 16 open pull requests though, with about 7 having 20 or more file changes, but I didn't dig into them to understand their significance. Maybe it's another feature I'll need to work on.
If you look at the one year window for elasticsearch
https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind...
its churn and activity has been extremely consistent and I'm not sure if this is an investment Amazon can and/or is willing to make.
However, knowing enterprise, I'm not sure if this will make a huge difference as those making the decisions might not really care and they'll just accept whatever Amazon tells them.
They have done extensive work in the Open Distro modules which I assume they will carry over. See: https://github.com/opendistro-for-elasticsearch/
A lot of the projects looks like they were created to make it easier for Amazon to manage elasticsearch on their infrastructure and/or to overcome license limitations for features that already exists in Elasticsearch.
Are there specific repositories that you know of that would contain functionality that Elasticsearch does not have, that would be a strong differentiating factor? I'd be curious to index these projects to get a better idea of the investment that Amazon is putting into opendistro-for-elasticsearch that could have an impact on OpenSearch.
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Elastic spends so much time and effort on making sure that their search is performant (and they are not shy about deprecating and removing features that are slow). I think this is where Elastic will continue to shine. It's one thing to add features, it's another to make it so they work well and make sure the integrating product team doesn't shoot themselves in the foot.
What may hurt them though, is the number of customers that currently feel things are currently "good enough". I don't know what their sales engagement looks like, so I'm not sure if this will really hurt them or not.
Perhaps! My money is on Elastic including an approximate nearest neighbor search in 8.0 which uses the new HNSW feature in Lucene 9, which is going to be hard to do in a distributed capacity and will be a significant feature if they can pull it off.
PS - I've never seen gitsense before and it's really cool. I especially like the focus quadrant!
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I agree, I trust there will be value for some in openSearch not using SSPL and value for others in Elastic's performant/scaleable tendencies.
I can't edit the comment anymore, but you can find the fork at https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?r=gith...