Discover what's new in OpenSearch 2.3 and upgrade today!
March 7, 2023 | 4 minute readOpenSearch is a community-driven, Apache 2.0-licensed open source search and analytics suite that makes it easy to ingest, search, visualize, and analyze data. This open source suite is designed to be highly scalable, secure, and reliable. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is offering OpenSearch as a managed service with high performance and low cost.
Today, we’re announcing the general availability of OpenSearch 2.3 as part of OCI Search with OpenSearch in all commercial regions. Read on to find out what improvements you get if you upgrade to 2.3 and some improvements and additions that work across all versions of OpenSearch.
Why upgrade to OpenSearch 2.3?
This new version includes several new features and improvements compared to release 1.2.4. With better support for cross-cluster search, improved support for plugins and extensions, and better integration with Kibana, OpenSearch 2.3 includes the following features:
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Higher performance: This version offers performance improvements resulting in 10–15% faster indexing with a faster underlying engine: Lucene 9.1.
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Security improvements: At Oracle, security is always the priority for our services, and OpenSearch is no exception. As part of our focus on security, we enabled the first phase of role-based access controls (RBAC) by offering username and password authentication, on top of existing OCI security and Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls. We plan to further enhance our RBAC offering with LDAP and Active Directory integration in future releases.
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API improvements: OpenSearch 2.3 introduces several new APIs for managing data, including support for bulk indexing, deleting, and the ability to manage indices and aliases.
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Query and indexing improvements: OpenSearch 2.3 includes improvements to the query language, including support for nested aggregations, geo point fields, and geohashes. It also includes improvements to indexing performance and scalability.
For OpenSearch 2.3, Oracle has also introduced a new capability through Index State Management (ISM), an OpenSearch plugin that offers automated management of index state transitions. With ISM, you have the power to define and automate actions in response to changes in index state, such as creating a snapshot or triggering a notification. This cutting-edge capability significantly improves the reliability of your indexes by ensuring they’re always in the state you define. Index management is simplified by defining policies once and then letting OpenSearch handle the rest. Create policies, states, actions, and transitions that are specific to your organization’s data needs. Furthermore, we also support the Index Management OSD plugin.
OpenSearch 2.3 also comes with the following experimental features:
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Segment replication, where segment files are copied across shards instead of documents being indexed on each shared copy
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Remote backend storage, an option to automatically back up all transactions on an index to durable remote storage
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Drag-and-drop visualization in OpenSearch Dashboards, a feature-rich set of tools to help you visualize and explore your data.
Improvements for every OpenSearch user
On top of those improvements thanks to the new release, we also introduced new features that are available today for versions 1.2.4 and 2.3.0 of OpenSearch.
Flexible backups: Snapshot API support
The OpenSearch Snapshot API is now enabled as part of OCI Search with OpenSearch. It allows you to manage snapshots and snapshot repositories. When combined with ISM, you can create a time-based Snapshot Management policy to specify the time interval or schedule for creating snapshots for a group of indexes, define how many of the snapshots to retain and specify the duration that meets your requirements. You can also use your own OCI Object Storage bucket for all your snapshots, while still knowing your automated backups will be maintained as part of our managed offering.
More plugin support
In addition to ISM and Snapshot API plugin support, we’ve been busy adding support for the following plugins:
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Language-specific analysis: We now support 42 languages, Unicode support, and phonetic representation.
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Mapper-size and ingest-attachment: Provides the ability to record uncompressed record sizes at index time using Apache Tika to extract content
Try OpenSearch today
With this new release, OCI Search with OpenSearch offers significant improvements in terms of performance, security, query and indexing performance, monitoring and alerting, API functionality, and other areas. So, try out our improved OCI Search with OpenSearch and increase your operational efficiency with advanced search and analytics features that help you gain near real-time insights to your critical application and log data.
To learn more about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Search with OpenSearch and other services, visit the following resources:
Jim Battenberg
Senior Director, Product Management
Jim Battenberg joined Oracle in late 2016. He is a Senior Director, Product Management for the Data Management Services team at Oracle, where his focus spans product management, business operations and solution architecture.
Jim’s time in “the cloud” dates back to the mid/late 90’s when the shared hosting, dedicated hosting and ASP markets first began implementing the core concepts of virtualization. He developed and launched a suite of profitable hosting services from scratch and helped take Interliant (later purchased by Navisite) public.
Prior to Oracle, Jim led the Platform Enablement team for the CenturyLink Cloud. Before that he led marketing, and created the first product marketing function for the Rackspace Cloud. He has also held senior product management and marketing leadership roles at enterprise hardware, software and hosting/cloud companies across startups and Fortune 500 firms. Jim holds a Finance degree and an MBA from the University of Houston.
Finally, Jim loves yoga, poker and trap music, and claims to be able to combine all 3 – but you’ll have to ask him to see it!