What is Amazon OpenSearch Service?

Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale OpenSearch clusters in the AWS Cloud. An OpenSearch Service domain is synonymous with an OpenSearch cluster. Domains are clusters with the settings, instance types, instance counts, and storage resources that you specify. Amazon OpenSearch Service supports OpenSearch and legacy Elasticsearch OSS (up to 7.10, the final open source version of the software). When you create a domain, you have the option of which search engine to use.

OpenSearch is a fully open-source search and analytics engine for use cases such as log analytics, real-time application monitoring, and clickstream analysis. For more information, see the OpenSearch documentation.

Amazon OpenSearch Service provisions all the resources for your OpenSearch cluster and launches it. It also automatically detects and replaces failed OpenSearch Service nodes, reducing the overhead associated with self-managed infrastructures. You can scale your cluster with a single API call or a few clicks in the console.

To get started using OpenSearch Service, you create an OpenSearch Service domain, which is equivalent to an OpenSearch cluster. Each EC2 instance in the cluster acts as one OpenSearch Service node.

You can use the OpenSearch Service console to set up and configure a domain in minutes. If you prefer programmatic access, you can use the AWS CLI, the AWS SDKs, or Terraform.

Features of Amazon OpenSearch Service

OpenSearch Service includes the following features:

Scale

• Numerous configurations of CPU, memory, and storage capacity known as instance types, including cost-effective Graviton instances

• Supports up to 1002 data nodes

• Up to 25 PB of attached storage

• Cost-effective UltraWarm and cold storage for read-only data

Security

• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) access control

• Easy integration with Amazon VPC and VPC security groups

• Encryption of data at rest and node-to-node encryption

• Amazon Cognito, HTTP basic, or SAML authentication for OpenSearch Dashboards

• Index-level, document-level, and field-level security

• Audit logs

• Dashboards multi-tenancy

Stability

• Numerous geographical locations for your resources, known as Regions and Availability Zones

• Node allocation across two or three Availability Zones in the same AWS Region, known as Multi-AZ

• Dedicated master nodes to offload cluster management tasks

• Automated snapshots to back up and restore OpenSearch Service domains

Flexibility

• SQL support for integration with business intelligence (BI) applications

• Custom packages to improve search results

Integration with popular services

• Data visualization using OpenSearch Dashboards

• Integration with Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring OpenSearch Service domain metrics and setting alarms

• Integration with AWS CloudTrail for auditing configuration API calls to OpenSearch Service domains

• Integration with Amazon S3, Amazon Kinesis, and Amazon DynamoDB for loading streaming data into OpenSearch Service

• Alerts from Amazon SNS when your data exceeds certain thresholds

When to use OpenSearch versus Amazon OpenSearch Service

Use the following table to help you decide whether provisioned Amazon OpenSearch Service or self-managed OpenSearch is the correct choice for you.

OpenSearch

Amazon OpenSearch Service

Your organization is willing to, and has people with the correct skills to, manually monitor and maintain self-provisioned clusters. You want full, compile-level control of your code. Your organization prefers, or uniquely uses, open source software. You have a multi-cloud strategy, requiring technologies that aren't vendor-specific. Your team is capable of addressing any critical production issues. You want the flexibility to use, modify, and extend the product however you want. You want immediate access to new features as soon as they’re released.

You don’t want to manually manage, monitor, and maintain your infrastructure. You want simple ways to manage growing analytics costs by layering your data across storage tiers, taking advantage of the durability and low cost of Amazon S3. You want to take advantage of integrations with other AWS services such as DynamoDB, Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), IAM, CloudWatch, and CloudFormation. You want easy access to assistance from AWS Support for preventative maintenance and during production issues. You want to take advantage of features such as self-healing, proactive maintenance, resiliency, and backups.

Supported versions of OpenSearch and Elasticsearch

OpenSearch Service supports multiple versions of OpenSearch and legacy open-source Elasticsearch versions. For some versions, we have already published end of standard support and extended support date. It is recommended you upgrade to the latest available OpenSearch version to get the best use of OpenSearch Service, in terms of price-performance, feature richness, and secuity improvements. Please see below table for a list of versions and their support schedule:

The end of support schedule for Elasticsearch versions is as follows:

Software Version	End of Standard Support	End of Extended Support
Elasticsearch versions 1.5 and 2.3	11/07/2025	11/07/2026
Elasticsearch versions 5.1 and 5.5	11/07/2025	11/07/2026
Elasticsearch versions 5.6	11/07/2025	11/07/2028
Elasticsearch versions 6.0 to 6.7	11/07/2025	11/07/2026
Elasticsearch versions 6.8	Not announced	11/07/2028
Elasticsearch versions 7.1 to 7.8	11/07/2025	11/07/2026
Elasticsearch versions 7.9	Not announced	Not announced
Elasticsearch versions 7.10	Not announced	Not announced

The end of support schedule for OpenSearch versions is as follows:

Software Version	End of Standard Support	End of Extended Support
OpenSearch versions 1.0 and 1.2	11/07/2025	11/07/2026
OpenSearch versions 1.3	Not announced	Not announced
OpenSearch versions 2.3 to 2.9	11/07/2025	11/07/2026
OpenSearch versions 2.11 and higher versions	Not announced	Not announced

Standard support and extended support of OpenSearch and Elasticsearch

AWS provides regular bug fixes and security updates for versions covered under Standard Support. For versions under Extended Support, AWS provides critical security fixes for a period of at least 12 months after end of standard support, for an additional flat fee/Normalized Instance Hour (NIH). NIH is computed as a factor of the instance size (e.g. medium, large), and number of instance hours (see calculating extended support charges section below for an example). Extended support charges are applied automatically when a domain is running a version for which standard support has ended. You can upgrade to a recent version that is still covered under standard support to avoid extended support charges. For more information on extended support charges, please see the pricing page. For general information about extended support, please see the FAQs.

Calculating extended support charges

Domains running versions under extended support will be charged a flat additional fee/Normalized Instance Hour (NIH), for example, $0.0065 in the US East (North Virginia) Region. NIH is computed as a factor of the instance size (e.g., medium, large), and the number of instance hours. For example, if you are running an m7g.medium.search instance for 24 hours in the US East (North Virginia) Region, which is priced at $0.068/Instance hour (on-demand), you will typically pay $1.632 ($0.068x24). If you are running a version that is in extended support, you will pay an additional $0.0065/NIH, which is computed as $0.0065 x 24 (number of instance hours) x 2 (size normalization factor; 2 for medium-sized instances), which comes to $0.312 for extended support for 24 hours. The total amount you will pay for 24 hours will be a sum of the standard instance usage cost and the extended support cost, which is $1.944 ($1.632+$0.312). The below table shows the normalization factor for various instance sizes in OpenSearch Service.

Instance size	Normalization Factor
nano	0.25
micro	0.5
small	1
medium	2
large	4
xlarge	8
2xlarge	16
4xlarge	32
8xlarge	64
9xlarge	72
10xlarge	80
12xlarge	96
16xlarge	128
18xlarge	144
24xlarge	192
32xlarge	256

Pricing for Amazon OpenSearch Service

For OpenSearch Service, you pay for each hour of use of an EC2 instance and for the cumulative size of any EBS storage volumes attached to your instances. Standard AWS data transfer charges also apply.

However, some notable data transfer exceptions exist. If a domain uses multiple Availability Zones, OpenSearch Service does not bill for traffic between the Availability Zones. Significant data transfer occurs within a domain during shard allocation and rebalancing. OpenSearch Service neither meters nor bills for this traffic. Similarly, OpenSearch Service does not bill for data transfer between UltraWarm/cold nodes and Amazon S3.

For full pricing details, see Amazon OpenSearch Service pricing. For information about charges incurred during configuration changes, see Charges for configuration changes.

Related services

OpenSearch Service commonly is used with the following services:

Amazon CloudWatch

OpenSearch Service domains automatically send metrics to CloudWatch so that you can monitor domain health and performance. For more information, see Monitoring OpenSearch cluster metrics with Amazon CloudWatch.

CloudWatch Logs can also go the other direction. You might configure CloudWatch Logs to stream data to OpenSearch Service for analysis. To learn more, see Loading streaming data from Amazon CloudWatch.

AWS CloudTrail

Use AWS CloudTrail to get a history of the OpenSearch Service configuration API calls and related events for your account. For more information, see Monitoring Amazon OpenSearch Service API calls with AWS CloudTrail.

Amazon Kinesis

Kinesis is a managed service for real-time processing of streaming data at a massive scale. For more information, see Loading streaming data from Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and Loading streaming data from Amazon Data Firehose.

Amazon S3

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) provides storage for the internet. This guide provides Lambda sample code for integration with Amazon S3. For more information, see Loading streaming data from Amazon S3.

AWS IAM

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a web service that you can use to manage access to your OpenSearch Service domains. For more information, see Identity and Access Management in Amazon OpenSearch Service.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. This guide provides Lambda sample code to stream data from DynamoDB, Amazon S3, and Kinesis. For more information, see Loading streaming data into Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database service that provides fast and predictable performance with seamless scalability. To learn more about streaming data to OpenSearch Service, see Loading streaming data from Amazon DynamoDB.

Amazon QuickSight

You can visualize data from OpenSearch Service using Amazon QuickSight dashboards. For more information, see Using Amazon OpenSearch Service with Amazon QuickSight in the Amazon QuickSight User Guide.

Note

OpenSearch includes certain Apache-licensed Elasticsearch code from Elasticsearch B.V. and other source code. Elasticsearch B.V. is not the source of that other source code. ELASTICSEARCH is a registered trademark of Elasticsearch B.V.