Licensing Change
Recently, Elastic.co made the announcement that they will no longer be releasing Elasticsearch and Kibana with the Apache version 2.0 license. Instead, it will be changed to SSPL (Server Side Public License) and Elastic license starting with version 7.11. These licenses are more restrictive and severely limit how Elasticsearch along with Kibana can be offered in the cloud environment for anyone besides Elastic.co. For our current Elasticsearch customers, this license change doesn’t alter any of the services we offer now with any of the Elasticsearch versions up to version 7.10.
The Future
So, what happens next for Elasticsearch on ObjectRocket? While we are currently looking into all viable options, there are two main ones that we are looking at closely. First, we are contemplating if a partnership with Elastic.co is possible and a good fit. A partnership would mean the ability to offer Elasticsearch along with Kibana versions 7.11 and later. Second, we are investigating an open-source alternative to Elasticsearch including Open Distro for Elasticsearch (Link). Other providers such as Amazon and logz.io have committed to the open-source alternative which you can read about here and here.
Commitment to Our Customers
When ObjectRocket was first founded, the mission was to offer a fantastic one stop shop for our customers’ open source datastore needs. That mission has not changed. We started with MongoDB and added other datastores such as Elasticsearch (which we have been supporting since version 1) and Redis because we believed that we could offer a product backed by service that is unrivaled. There are other providers of Elasticsearch out there but the reason our customers stay and keep coming back to us for all their ES needs is because of the support we offer. No matter the time of day or the amount of support a customer needs the team at ObjectRocket has and will always be there. Therefore, we want to make sure whichever path we take with our Elasticsearch offering, it will be in the best interest for our customers.
