That’s a wrap! Canonical attends the very first OpenSearchCon in Seattle

A few of us at Canonical travelled from Europe to the beautiful Pacific Northwest, Seattle, Washington and attended the very first OpenSearchCon. Huge congratulations to the OpenSearch team for the well-organised, first ever in-person conference held on 21 September 2022 at Fremont Studios.

Best in class open-source search and analytics suite

OpenSearch brings to the forefront the next wave of search and analytics technology. OpenSearch makes it easy to ingest, search, visualise, and analyse data. Developers build with OpenSearch for use cases such as application search, log analytics, data observability, data ingestion, and more.

A common use case is log analytics. You take the logs from an application, feed them into OpenSearch, and use the rich search and visualisation functionality to identify issues. For example, a malfunctioning web server might throw a 500 error 0.5% of the time, which can be hard to notice unless you have a real-time graph of all HTTP status codes the server has thrown in the past four hours. You can use OpenSearch Dashboards to build these sorts of visualisations from data in OpenSearch.

OpenSearch is Apache 2.0 licensed software, which means it’s open source and maintained by the community. OpenSearch includes a network of partners and is open to contribution. OpenSearch also has principles for development, as the organisation believes that great open-source software is built with a diverse community of contributors. Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, is proud to be a member of this expanding community.

OpenSearchCon – fully packed with talks and community engagements

OpenSearchCon is an event for the community. This first edition successfully gathered users, developers, and technologists from across the open-source world to learn, collaborate and innovate. The event consists of multiple talks about the past, present and future of the OpenSearch project. 

OpenSearchCon keynote speaker and Product Manager Eli Fisher, highlighted the importance of OpenSearch and the project’s successes since it started in 2021. OpenSearch has seen rapid and sustainable growth. Currently, there are 19 open source community projects, 5.8K stars on GitHub. The OpenSearch project is also part of the top 5 search engines in DB engine rankings.

Presentations at the event covered a variety of topics, from OpenSearch technology and architecture to use cases, community empowerment, operations and security. The OpenSearch  roadmap was also discussed. 

Use cases presented included anomaly detection and observability. Speakers also shared how OpenSearch addresses data and analytics needs in both small and large-scale businesses. 

OpenSearch community leaders also joined the event. In line with this, the OpenSearch core team recognised multiple community contributors and maintainers of the open source project. In addition, community-driven talks highlighted some topics on how to contribute and how organisations can benefit by joining the project.

OpenSearch operators, powered by Juju

Mehdi Bendriss, Senior Engineer at Canonical, gave a presentation about deploying OpenSearch solutions on hybrid multi-cloud environments. This topic includes Canonical’s plans to collaborate and work with the community on the creation of an OpenSearch operator.  By using operators, app administrators and analysts who run workloads in various infrastructures are able to automate tasks to take care of repetitive operational work. Software operators codify the knowledge of an organisation’s operational team to manage, operate and secure applications in the production environment. 

Canonical has developed multiple application operators, known as charms, which are published in Charmhub.io. The charms use Juju, the Charmed Operator Framework. Canonical is working on OpenSearch operators and will publish them in Charmhub soon to make them available to the community. 

In addition, Canonical plans to publish the OpenSearch snap package in the Snapcraft Store. Snaps are a simple packaging format that is distributed as a single file (squashfs) similar to a dmg on OSX. This capability can give simple installation instructions for any snap-enabled Linux system. Snaps are also created with multiple channels that can be leveraged for the different states of the development workflow. This feature would provide a quick way to test and keep track of the latest changes in the product in an easy way.

The combination of OpenSearch search and analytics technology and Canonical security, packaging and automation expertise will deliver a human-friendly, highly secure and robust OpenSearch on any cloud – be it public cloud, private cloud and bare metal.

Be part of the ‘search’ and open source innovation

At Canonical we support innovations such as OpenSearch, which carry the values of open-source technology and community.

Would you like to contribute to OpenSearch and other open-source projects? Here are a few things you should check out:. 

• Join the OpenSearch forums, community meetings, and community projects. 
• The OpenSearch roadmap is rapidly developing and you can also contribute. 
• Stay informed about our Charmed Operators and innovations in the Juju community. You can join some community discussions in  Mattermost and Discourse.
• The Ubuntu community covers a wide range of topics about operating systems and different open-source technologies.

Kudos to the OpenSearch team, and see you again at OpenSearchCon 2023!