The Real Reason why Oracle ditched ElasticSearch for OpenSearch
Elastic Search & Kibana in PeopleSoft will soon be replaced with OpenSearch & OpenSearch Dashboard. Oracle announced this in recent conferences and also noted that in this blog post.
Per Oracle’s blog post, Elasticsearch 7.10 and Kibana 7.10 will be the last version of ELK (Elastic, Logstash, Kibana ) delivered by Oracle as part of PeopleTools & future releases will be based on OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards.
Also, in the post, Oracle explained why they decided to move from Elastic search to OpenSearch.
“…why are we making this change? The licensing model adopted by Elastic will make it difficult for us to continue to use ELK in PeopleTools beyond version 7.10. If we did, it would inevitably mean that we would bear licensing costs which will consequently impact our customers. This is not the path we prefer to take!”
So what changed in the Elastic Search License ?
This is actually a move resulting from a business war between Elastic Search and Amazon.
You must be wondering how did Amazon come into the picture. It’s because OpenSearch is owned by Amazon Web Services.
Per Elastic Search, they decided to change their licensing policies due to Amazon’s trademark infringement.
They even stated that “Our products remain free and open, but Amazon can no longer freely use Elasticsearch and Kibana products without collaborating with us. ” and that Amazon’s OpenSearch i.e. fork of Elastic Search, is inferior to Elasticsearch & Kibana.
Amazon has its own version of the story of why it decided to create OpenSearch.
Per Amazon, it created OpenSearch because Elasticsearch was no longer opensource when Elastic decided to release it under Elastic License. So Amazon decided to create OpenSearch.
If you want to learn more about the Search War between Elastic & OpenSearch, watch this video.
Oracle realized that due to the change in licensing for ElasicSearch and Kibana, features of ElasticSearch are no longer open source and this will incur additional cost for Oracle to use it in its products such as PeopleSoft.
So, Oracle decided to join OpenSearch as a partner in Dec 2021, as announced in this blog post.
And then in May 2022, Oracle announced that OpenSearch is available for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Search Service.
Next is PeopleSoft.
Hopefully, now you understand the real reason why Oracle decided to move away from ElasticSearch to OpenSearch and how the technology war between Elastic & Amazon led to new search changes for PeopleSoft application.
