Open Distro for Elasticsearch – How Different Is It?

In April 2019, AWS announced Open Distro for Elasticsearch, sparking discussions about its implications for the ELK Stack and its community. The Open Distro, despite its name, includes not only Elasticsearch but also Kibana and additional plugins, excluding Logstash and Beats. At version 0.8.0, it is not yet production-ready, with installation available via RPM package or Docker images. Notably, the security plugin, based on Search Guard code, is enabled by default, offering features such as role-based access and audit logging. The alerting mechanism allows users to configure alerts for Elasticsearch indices, although it remains somewhat undeveloped. The Performance Analyzer plugin provides metrics monitoring, albeit without time-based analysis. While Open Distro offers Apache 2.0 licensed features for free, maintaining large-scale data pipelines with it or the ELK Stack incurs significant operational costs. Despite these challenges, the Open Distro initiative is seen as a positive step toward greater innovation within the ELK ecosystem.

Use this post, company, and trend context to find content marketing opportunities, perform competitive analysis, or address product feature gaps via the Plushcap MCP server or the Plushcap API.