OpenSearch Software Foundation Marks 1-Year Anniversary with Community Growth, Agentic AI and Hybrid Search Enhancements

Foundation advances AI innovation for search, observability and analytics as project downloads increase 78% year-over-year

AMSTERDAM – Open Source Summit Europe – 25 August 2025 – The OpenSearch Software Foundation, the vendor-neutral home for the OpenSearch project, today celebrates the first anniversary of its formation under the Linux Foundation. In its inaugural year, the Foundation has advanced its mission to grow and evolve OpenSearch’s open source platform for AI-powered search, observability, and analytics. 

Through consistent feature development, broader community participation, and increased industry integration, OpenSearch has cemented its position as a foundational technology for modern, data-driven applications. As the industry shifts toward agentic AI, the OpenSearch Software Foundation will continue to deliver a fully open source platform designed for high-performance information retrieval, enabling faster, more efficient AI development and real-time insights at scale.

“OpenSearch’s advancement in its first year under the Linux Foundation shows the strength of open collaboration in meeting modern data challenges,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president of legal and strategic programs of the Linux Foundation. "The project’s growth and the community's engagement demonstrate the critical role open source plays in modern search and analytics infrastructure."

Since the Foundation’s launch in September 2024, OpenSearch project downloads have increased 78% year-over-year, bringing total downloads to more than 1 billion. In its first year, the OpenSearch Software Foundation:

• Drove community participation with more than 400 active contributing organizations and more than 8,800 contributions
• Enabled global collaboration with the highest contributions from the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and India
• Expanded its membership base to 16 organizations, with the addition of ByteDance, DataStax, DTEX and Seacom Srl
• Established a technical steering committee of 15 members representing corporate and independent entities, including Aryn, AWS, ByteDance, IBM, Paessler, Salesforce, SAP and Uber

The Foundation’s growth reflects the industry’s increased demand for open source AI and, in turn, search technology as a foundational imperative. To meet changing industry needs, the OpenSearch project has made tremendous strides in its vector engine, hybrid search and observability capabilities, enabling accelerated AI application development. 

A few highlights from milestone launch 3.0 and subsequent 3.1 and 3.2 releases include:

Enhanced vector engine and agentic AI capabilities drive generative AI innovation 

• Enhanced Vector Database Functionality: Eases development and deployment at speed with native agentic AI support through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and GPU acceleration.
• Support for new FP16, Byte and Binary Vector Types: Enables more efficient and scalable use of resources to build a broader range of applications with GPU-accelerated indexing.
• Agentic Search: Enables natural language engagement and ease of use for developers. This experimental query type, proposed in 3.2, triggers an agent-driven workflow for query understanding, planning and execution.
• Agentic Memory: Experimental in 3.2, it allows developers to build AI agents that leverage semantic search to recall relevant context from previous interactions, which increases the quality of future sessions.

Increased hybrid search speed and efficiency deliver real-time insights

• Enhanced Search Performance: OpenSearch 3.2 increases query speed by 11x compared to OpenSearch 1.3, as hybrid search algorithms deliver up to 65% faster query times and up to 3.5x increase in throughput.
• General Availability of gRPC support: Enables faster and more efficient data transport and data processing for OpenSearch deployments. 
• Approximation Framework Enhancements: New in 3.2, it improves both responsiveness of paginated search results, real-time dashboards, and applications with “search_after queries” as well as performance improvements in analytics workloads and time-series data analysis with the expansion of approximate query capabilities to all numeric field types.
• Streaming Aggregation Functionality: Experimental feature in 3.2, it is built on streaming transport and improves resource distribution by making the coordinator the single point to scale.

Advanced observability functionality enhances accuracy and efficiency

• Cross-cluster Search for Traces: Enables seamless trace analysis across clusters for enterprises running distributed systems.
• Piped Processing Language (PPL) Upgrades: Boosts performance, accuracy and usability for complex queries across OpenSearch data sources, bringing ease and efficiency to complex log analytics workstreams.

Platform Modernization to Enable Future Community Collaboration 

• Upgrade to Lucene 10: Improves performance, maintainability, and to support continued contributions from a growing open source developer base

"As the Foundation moves into its second year, we’re focused on building on this momentum to make OpenSearch the most capable open source platform for search, analytics, and observability in the era of AI,” said Carl Meadows, governing board chair at the OpenSearch Software Foundation and director of product management at Amazon Web Services (AWS). “The strong foundation we’ve built with our community and members enables us to take on changing industry challenges and continue delivering technology that developers and enterprises can rely on.”

Industry leaders contributed and supported the project’s technical advancements, including: 

• ByteDance: Contributed ideas to the derived source feature for OpenSearch k-NN and implemented significant performance improvements for the segment replication protocol.
• IBM DataStax: Contributed the JVector engine to OpenSearch vector search, which offers another pure Java-based implementation for vector workloads and offers integration with AstraDB.
• Intel: Contributed SIMD to OpenSearch k-NN, enabling performance gains when running on supported hardware.
• SAP: Contributed towards FIPS compliance, allowing OpenSearch to support workloads that require conformance with the FIPS specification.
• Uber: Contributed pull-based ingestion, removing the need for complicated client tuning and configuration required by the bulk API, allowing Uber to integrate OpenSearch directly into an existing system.

To learn more about the OpenSearch Software Foundation, including how to get involved, become a member or contribute, please visit foundation.opensearch.org/. See our blog for more information on the 1-year anniversary, and learn more about OpenSearch 3.1 and 3.2 in the release blogs.

Supporting Quotes

"Within our first year with the Linux Foundation’s OpenSearch project, DTEX has seen firsthand how open collaboration fuels innovation. As a foundation member, user and code contributor, we bring AI-powered capabilities grounded in industry-leading behavioral research to advance insider risk management, data security, and workforce behavioral intelligence within the OpenSearch ecosystem. This collaboration, supported by AWS’s robust cloud infrastructure, has enabled us to deliver scalable solutions that proactively protect organizations from unwanted risks while strengthening and growing the OpenSearch community.”

– Jessica Ray, chief marketing officer, DTEX

"We are excited by the advancements in AI use cases with each new version of OpenSearch, bringing its powerful advancements to our customers and empowering them to deliver agentic AI. The OpenSearch Software Foundation has significantly boosted OpenSearch's user adoption in the last year, demonstrating the power of community-driven open source. We remain committed to collaborating with the community to accelerate development and drive innovation together."

– Ben Slater, vice president and general manager, NetApp Instaclustr

“SAP customers expect a unified, business-centric and open SAP Business Technology Platform, and this extends to its observability capabilities. OpenSearch is a key technology that helps us deliver on that promise. As a premium member from day one, our collaboration within the OpenSearch Software Foundation is instrumental. It allows us to help steer the project's roadmap, ensuring OpenSearch evolves to meet the demanding, enterprise-grade requirements of all global customers. Congratulations to the foundation on a successful first year.”

– Verena Lommatzsch, head of SAP BTP Technical Services, SAP

"OpenSearch is pivotal to our long term sustainable search platform strategy, and we are excited to continue to work with this amazing community. Our 1-year experience operating and building new features, like gRPC and pull-based ingestion, into OpenSearch 3.0 has reinforced our commitment to this thriving open-source ecosystem."

– Yupeng Fu, principal software engineer, Uber

About the OpenSearch Software Foundation

The OpenSearch Software Foundation is a vendor-neutral community for search, analytics, observability, and vector database software. Hosted by the Linux Foundation and supported by premier members such as AWS, SAP and Uber, the OpenSearch Software Foundation works with community maintainers, developers, and member organizations to drive the continued growth of the OpenSearch project. With more than 900 million software downloads since its inception and participation from thousands of contributors, the OpenSearch project and its community are transforming how information is managed and discovered. To learn more, please visit foundation.opensearch.org.

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Media Contact

Kristi Piechnik
The Linux Foundation
kpiechnik@linuxfoundation.org