It has been a busy couple of months for Instaclustr’s OpenSearch team! We are excited to announce new features and updates that we want to share with you. 

Enhanced Connection Experience   

We have improved the onboarding experience by making it easier to connect to your OpenSearch cluster. You can now have a network load balancer in front of your cluster with a public certificate authority for establishing trust.

We learned that some customers have configured their applications to use load balancers to connect to their clusters. This is preferential to our previously suggested sniffing approach, as some OpenSearch clients do not document this approach their sniffing results adequately. We also realized that using self-signed certificates meant extra manual configuration for customers, so we simplified it. The following support pages provide further information on connecting with a load balancer. This will enable you to get up and running with the OpenSearch cluster even sooner.   

Key features of the enhanced connection options include: 

• A network load balancer as an Enterprise add-on providing a single endpoint in front of the OpenSearch clusters across AWS, GCP and Azure cloud service providers. While support was originally  limited to the GCP public network cluster, you can now use a load balancer on your GCP private network cluster too. Enterprise features are all available for a 20% total increase on top of the node price. 
• A trusted public certificate authority for new OpenSearch clusters, simplifying the process of establishing and maintaining trust over a broader range of environments. 
• Support for existing customers wishing to update their connection approach or upgrade from earlier versions. 

AWS PrivateLink Support 

Instaclustr’s Managed OpenSearch offering now supports AWS PrivateLink, building on the release of AWS PrivateLink on our Apache Kafka offering.  

AWS PrivateLink is a feature that security-conscious customers may choose. When provisioning clusters with AWS PrivateLink, it removes the possibility of a network route from the customer’s OpenSearch cluster back into the customer’s VPC. It also simplifies networking compared to managing CIDR ranges between VPCs and it removes the need for you to manage VPC peering and route tables.  

Our AWS PrivateLink feature is offered as an Enterprise feature, and like all other Enterprise features it is available for a 20% total increase on top of the node price. The following support page outlines the steps required to provision your first OpenSearch cluster with AWS PrivateLink. Your AWS account will require some additional configuration to connect via PrivateLink, details of which can be found on our support page. 

Additional Plugin Support 

Since our last update for OpenSearch, we have added support for 4 additional plugins.  

k-NN Plugin – The k-NN Plugin extends OpenSearch by allowing new search types using the K-Nearest Neighbors algorithm, which is often used in recommendation engines. The OpenSearch project provides documentation on how to get started with the k-NN Plugin. 

Alerting Plugins – The Alerting plugin allows alerts to be triggered when conditions occur in your cluster indices. Examples of alerts could be “no new documents have been indexed in the past 20 minutes” or “your application logged more than five HTTP 503 errors in one hour”. If these alert conditions are met, a notification will be sent to Slack or PagerDuty.   

In OpenSearch version 1.3.7, this functionality is available via a consolidated Alerting Plugin. Separate Alerting and Notification Plugins will be included in the 2.x release in the coming weeks. The OpenSearch project provides documentation on how to get started with the Alerting Plugin. 

Reporting Plugin – This allows users of OpenSearch Dashboards to create reports that are downloadable in PDF or PNG formats or generated in CSV format. An example of the options to generate reports is found below: 

ICU Plugin – This leverages the Apache Lucence ICU module (70) to allow support for Unicode Characters and extends support for many Asian languages including Mandarin and Japanese. 

OpenSearch 2.2 General Availability and 1.x Version Bumps 

OpenSearch 2.2.1 has been released to General Availability, building on our preview release of OpenSearch 2.0 earlier in 2022. OpenSearch 2.2.1 addresses bugs and CVEs in earlier versions of OpenSearch 2.x.  

Key features that have been added to OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards in version 2.x include: 

• Upgrading to Lucene 9.1, which is the underlying search library used by OpenSearch. 
• In a shift towards inclusive naming, Instaclustr has reflected these changes in our management console. 
• Geolocation improvements in OpenSearch Dashboards to allow updates to Map Tiles more frequently. 
• Updates to the OpenSearch Dashboard include a redesign to more effectively use header and menu space. 
• Introducing a circuit breaker in OpenSearch Dashboards to assist with managing resource issues. 

In OpenSearch 1.x we have been busy keeping up with the high release cadence of the OpenSearch project. OpenSearch 1.3.7 is the currently Generally Available version and addresses bugs and CVEs. Full release notes for all versions can be found on the OpenSearch GitHub repository.