AWS recently announced the preview of OpenSearch Serverless, a new OpenSearch service option that automatically provision and scale resources to accept data and answer queries. The minimal capacity required for the serverless option has raised some concerns in the community.

Allowing developers to run large-scale search and analysis workloads without managing clusters, OpenSearch Serverless supports the latest versions of OpenSearch and previous versions of Elasticsearch, as well as OpenSearch Dashboards and Kibana.

“Prior to the release of OpenSearch Serverless, you created a managed cluster by defining the instance types, counts, and storage options, and then managed the lifecycle and index strategy within that cluster. With OpenSearch Serverless, you create a collection that manages a group of indexes that work together to support a specific workload. You no longer need to specify the hardware or manage the indexes directly.”,

Chani Yoon, chief developer advocate at AWS, explains

OpenSearch Serverless decouples compute and storage, and separates the indexing (ingest) components from the search (query) components, with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) being the primary storage service for the indexes. With this decoupled architecture, OpenSearch Serverless can scale the search and indexing functions independently of each other and independently of the indexed data in Amazon S3.
For example, when an application monitoring workload receives a sudden burst of logging activity during an availability event, OpenSearch Serverless immediately scales ingest and storage resources without impacting query response times.

OpenSearch Serverless is now available in the following AWS regions: US East (Ohio), US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Ireland).