Five years after the fork, OpenSearch is slowly stepping out of AWS’s shadow
OpenSearch has come a long way since Amazon Web Services first announced the project back in January 2021, in response The post Five years after the fork, OpenSearch is slowly stepping out of AWS’s shadow appeared first on The New Stack .
Five years after Amazon Web Services (AWS) created OpenSearch as a fork of Elastic's Elasticsearch, the project is gradually distancing itself from AWS’s control. Backed initially by AWS, OpenSearch was spun out to the Linux Foundation in September 2024, establishing the OpenSearch Software Foundation. This change has resulted in a decline of AWS's contribution activities from 91% in its first year to 72% in 2025-26, with Amazon-affiliated engineers representing a smaller share of maintainers in the core OpenSearch repository (71% today, compared to 95% in April 2022).
According to the 2026 Open Data Infrastructure Report by the Linux Foundation and OpenSearch Software Foundation, self-managed deployments have increased faster than AWS’s managed OpenSearch Service since 2024. However, nearly a quarter of surveyed non-adopters cite concerns about OpenSearch's vendor neutrality and historical ties to AWS as reasons for avoiding the project.
The Linux Foundation's executive director, Bianca Lewis, argues that donating OpenSearch to the Linux Foundation was a significant milestone, as it resulted in legal independence and a change in license. Lewis adds that AWS does not make money from applications but from computing resources, and thus, growing OpenSearch long-term was not in AWS's original plan.
Lewis believes that OpenSearch's recent improvements, such as support for vector and hybrid search that is relevant to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), make it a strong candidate for enterprise AI infrastructure.
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