What is our primary use case?
Amazon OpenSearch Service is a user-friendly version of Elasticsearch, as per my understanding. I have been using it for our volunteer management system where around 5,000 to 6,000 users are using this product. Amazon OpenSearch Service is used for keeping unstructured data, such as the information of our users who are logging in, logging out, and performing actions. We are keeping the events in Amazon OpenSearch Service, AWS OpenSearch. In my earlier company at Rakuten Viki solution, we used Elasticsearch for two purposes. First, we used it for keeping the logs of our application as a sidecar pattern. Second, we used it for keeping our products' names and metadata for text and setting functionalities.
I use it for keeping our users' events. Whenever a user is logging in, whenever they're clicking on any specific button, or doing any specific function in our application, which is basically the volunteer management system, we're keeping all this event data in Amazon OpenSearch Service.
What is most valuable?
I found it a bit easier to work with the documentation and also the APIs they provide, as those are interactive. It's actually easier to collaborate since it is already deployed in the AWS cloud itself.
Since Amazon OpenSearch Service is an integrated service in AWS itself, we can hop between the AWS CloudTrail or any other logging service of AWS, but definitely Amazon OpenSearch Service provides us some analytics which is really helpful.
In our application, it is one of the components. For example, we are keeping some data in Amazon OpenSearch Service, and based on this Amazon OpenSearch Service data searching, we are also updating in our data ingestion service. Also, we are storing the same data in a modified version in another system, Amazon RDS with PostgreSQL or similar RDS itself. Therefore, we are keeping the connection between Amazon OpenSearch Service and other AWS services.
What needs improvement?
Amazon OpenSearch Service is not providing the processing feature directly. From Amazon OpenSearch Service, we are actually maintaining the AWS SQS, the queue service, which is responsible for providing information about what data has to be modified. So using that SQS, we're actually providing it, but we're not directly using Amazon OpenSearch Service for keeping data to other data pipeline thing.
So far we didn't use it for any machine learning purposes, but in future, we have plans to extend or implement this feature.
Since AWS itself is secure and Amazon OpenSearch Service is a part of this entire ecosystem, it becomes much easier for security purposes. From the validation point of view, Amazon OpenSearch Service itself provides easy to communicate APIs and up-to-date documents, which is much beneficial. For example, if I'm missing anything, I can directly go and check the documentation. That is actually much easier.
I would rate it as really good so far. It's much faster. For our local machine, we can also use a kind of replica of Amazon OpenSearch Service just for development purposes. That is another good feature. I would say for the encryption thing and also the user access control management, it's much faster. For some of these hashing algorithms, it also worked really well so far.
To be honest, I didn't find any places where it can be improved. However, I think they could provide more abstraction. For example, still for searching, we have to write down the queries in a specific manner, such as for a specific JSON structure or in a specific way. Otherwise, they don't provide us the actual results. For at least this purpose, I think abstraction could be a bit easier or a bit improved. Other than that, right now there is the age of AI, so some kind of prompting could also work, but I'm not sure how it could be integrated.
As a user, lower prices or reasonable pricing is always better. Those can be improved as well. However, it is good that most of the services including Amazon OpenSearch Service actually provide pay as you go pricing. So if there were a bit lower version or a bit less payment methodology, it might be much better.
For how long have I used the solution?
I'm working on Amazon OpenSearch Service, AWS OpenSearch for one and a half years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I'm not using Amazon OpenSearch Service for a long period of time, at least just one and a half year, but I can assure I have a very good experience on Elasticsearch while I was working in a big enterprise solution. If I compare Elasticsearch with Amazon OpenSearch Service, I would definitely say Amazon OpenSearch Service is much better in documentation and API. It's much more secure. It's also much easier to communicate as a developer because they provide some interactive examples and an interactive way to actually start the hands-on. I would actually put Amazon OpenSearch Service a bit higher. Whereas for Elasticsearch, it is definitely a no-go for me because at least at that time when I was using it, I found it as open source, so it actually provided much better features. There was also an enterprise version at that time. However, I found that the documentation were a bit challenging and also sometimes it took a deep learning curve. That's a win for Amazon OpenSearch Service itself, rather than Elasticsearch.
To be honest, I'm right now not completely sure about how much it's improved from Elasticsearch. I have seen in some of my research a few hours ago that Elasticsearch is actually providing some very nice features and new features are upcoming. But as I already mentioned, since I'm not that much familiar with it for at least one and a half year, I'm not sure how much it's improved actually.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
They are providing the platform out there in the AWS. I can go there and from the UI, I can just create my own collection. I can use and create my own indexes, and then I can actually do some CLI calls and basic API calls and then I can check it by myself. Also, when everything is working perfectly, then we have tried with the Infrastructure as Code approach, using Terraform, and we have done that thing automatically. In the initial setup, I won't say we face that much issue or problem for Amazon OpenSearch Service.
I have bought it from the AWS cloud itself because we have the AWS account. From there, I can enable the service and then it goes on actually.
How are customer service and support?
So far, we didn't face any issues, but I'm not sure about the future.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I think Elasticsearch has a very good market if it can improve in a number of places. As I didn't experience it, I'm not sure how much beneficial it will be. But from the last experience I got from Elasticsearch, I would say if the documentation was a bit better, if it could have better features regarding the integration of AI, where you are actually writing down some prompts and it's just doing its job under the hood, or if there are some good monitoring dashboards, like for example, last time when we were using Elasticsearch, we were using it for logging and then we were also using it for the ELK stack with Grafana and Kibana. So, if those things could be improved, if running Elasticsearch itself, the server, becomes less resource-intensive, it might be much better. I'm not sure right now how it's going on, as far as I can remember from my last experience, we were running it at least with an 8 GB store, and it was sometimes really difficult to actually manage some of our indexes and collections. Overall, these are just the things regarding Elasticsearch, but I think it has a very good chance to gain traction in the Dev community.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
So far, we are getting some good insights or good results. However, if there are any better third-party applications which provide similar type of safety, security and latency, then we'd definitely catch it up. But definitely it is also true that Amazon OpenSearch Service is not that much cheap. It actually involves a big pricing as well. So if there is any better alternative, we'll definitely catch it up.
What other advice do I have?
Thank you. Bye. I would rate my overall experience with Amazon OpenSearch Service as an eight out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)