Five Years After the Fork, OpenSearch Is Slowly Stepping Out of AWS's Shadow
The New Stack, Saturday, October 31st, 2026
Five years after AWS forked Elasticsearch into OpenSearch, AWS's share of contributions has fallen to 72% as the project gains independence.
AWS announced OpenSearch in January 2021 after Elastic changed Elasticsearch licensing, and moved it to the Linux Foundation in September 2024.
Foundation figures show AWS's share of contribution activity fell from 91% in the first year to 72% in 2025-26, and AWS holds four of 15 voting seats on the Technical Steering Committee.
A Linux Foundation report suggests self-managed deployments are growing faster than Amazon's managed service, though 24% of surveyed non-adopters cite vendor neutrality concerns.
The project now targets AI workloads with vector and hybrid search, and OpenSearch 3.9 shipped in September.