Overview
Managed OpenSearch on Exoscale is a fully-managed, open-source search-and-analytics engine delivered as Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). Built on the community-driven fork of Elasticsearch 7.10.2, it provides a familiar API, OpenSearch Dashboards, and enterprise-grade operational automation—so you can focus on ingesting, searching, and visualising data instead of running clusters.
Terminology
- Service
- A managed OpenSearch deployment, isolated per customer.
- Cluster
- One or more OpenSearch nodes backing a service.
- Node
- A virtual machine that stores data and executes queries.
- Index
- A logical collection of JSON documents.
- Shard / Replica
- Primary or copy of a shard that distributes an index across nodes for scalability and resilience.
- Plan
- Preset resources & redundancy level (hobbyist, startup, business, premium).
- Dashboard
- The built-in OpenSearch Dashboards UI for visualisation and management.
Features
- Managed lifecycle
- automated provisioning, rolling upgrades, in-place re-sizing, and health monitoring.
- High availability options
- multi-node business / premium plans with adjustable
number_of_replicas. Automatic safeguards ensure the replica count always fits the cluster size. - OpenSearch Dashboards
- one-click access for ad-hoc queries and visualisations.
- Security by default
- TLS-encrypted endpoints, IP filtering, and service-level isolation.
- Automated backups
- daily encrypted snapshots retained per-plan.
- Horizontal & vertical scaling
- upgrade RAM/CPU or add nodes with zero-downtime operations via CLI/API.
OpenSearch vs Elasticsearch
OpenSearch is an open-source fork of the original Elasticsearch project. When Elastic NV adopted the Server Side Public License (SSPL) in 2021, the licence prevented Exoscale from offering Elasticsearch as a service. The community—including our DBaaS partner Aiven—responded by forking the last Apache-licensed versions (7.10.2) of Elasticsearch and Kibana, creating OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards.