Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched its new Open Distro for Elasticsearch. The new release is a “value-added distribution of Elasticsearch that is 100 percent open source,” according to the company. The distribution is available under an Apache 2.0 license and supported by Amazon.
Elasticsearch is a business-oriented search engine for structured and unstructured data, based on the open source Apache Lucene project. It is typically used for log analytics, large text searches, security intelligence, business analytics and operational intelligence use cases.
AWS has its own version of the software with the AWS Elasticsearch Service, a managed solution that makes it easy to deploy, use and scale Elasticsearch clusters on its cloud infrastructure.
Open Distro
The new Open Distro for Elasticsearch is based on the open source code for the regular Elasticsearch project, but also contains code from Kibana, reports Silicon Angle. Kibana is a data visualization plugin for Elasticsearch. Open Distro, however, is not a fork of Elasticsearch, says Adrian Cockroft, vice president of cloud architecture strategy at AWS. Instead, it is intended to be a separate and “feature-rich” version of the platform, which is completely open source.
According to Cockroft, Open Distro is necessary because Elasticsearch Global – the main developer of Elasticsearch – blurs things by adding a lot of its own software to the code base. Adding own code to create new features is no problem, but in the case of Elasticsearch is now no longer clear what open source users get, suggests the top man of AWS.
“For example, the release notes and documentation do not make it clear what open source is and what proprietary technology is,” says Cockroft. “Enterprise developers may inadvertently add a solution or improvement to their own source code. This is difficult to track and manage, and can lead to a violation of the license and the immediate termination of the rights.”
New features
Open Distro itself has several new open source functions that are not included in the regular version. These include encryption of data on the move, user authentication, and granular role-based access control.
The new features are designed to fill a number of gaps in the open source version of Elasticsearch, where features such as security, event monitoring and SQL support are only available to people who pay for Elastic’s own code.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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