What is Amazon OpenSearch Service used for?

Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed AWS service for running OpenSearch for full-text search, log analytics, semantic search and retrieval for AI applications. It is a good fit for adding search to an application, analyzing logs and application events, and retrieval for generative AI apps.

How much does Amazon OpenSearch Service cost?

Amazon OpenSearch Service is a paid product with no free plan. Pay-as-you-go with instance hours plus storage. An example m7g.medium.search instance is $0.068 per hour on-demand, EBS storage is $0.135 and UltraWarm storage $0.024 per GB per month.

Is Amazon OpenSearch Service open source?

No. Amazon OpenSearch Service is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon OpenSearch Service include Vespa, Elasticsearch and Typesense.

What are some alternatives to Amazon OpenSearch Service?

Amazon OpenSearch Service competes with Elastic, Azure AI Search and Algolia. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon OpenSearch Service alternatives.

Amazon OpenSearch Service: pricing and alternatives

About Amazon OpenSearch Service

Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed AWS offering for the open-source OpenSearch engine. It runs search and analytics clusters without teams having to provision, patch or scale the underlying servers, and it is used for application search, log and observability analytics and, increasingly, retrieval for AI.

AWS presents it as a managed engine for retrieval in AI and search workloads at very large scale, supporting retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search and observability, with serverless scaling available. The engine is open source, but the service itself is a proprietary AWS offering with no self-managed edition from Amazon, billed on usage; AWS publishes a pricing page and documentation.

Key features

Managed OpenSearch clusters
Full-text search for applications
Log analytics and observability
Vector and semantic search for RAG
Serverless scaling option

Good fit for

→Adding search to an application
→Analyzing logs and application events
→Retrieval for generative AI apps

Tags: opensearch; aws; search; log-analytics; vector-search; rag; managed-service

Amazon OpenSearch Service: questions and answers

What is Amazon OpenSearch Service used for?: Amazon OpenSearch Service is a managed AWS service for running OpenSearch for full-text search, log analytics, semantic search and retrieval for AI applications. It is a good fit for adding search to an application, analyzing logs and application events, and retrieval for generative AI apps.
How much does Amazon OpenSearch Service cost?: Amazon OpenSearch Service is a paid product with no free plan. Pay-as-you-go with instance hours plus storage. An example m7g.medium.search instance is $0.068 per hour on-demand, EBS storage is $0.135 and UltraWarm storage $0.024 per GB per month.
Is Amazon OpenSearch Service open source?: No. Amazon OpenSearch Service is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Amazon OpenSearch Service include Vespa, Elasticsearch and Typesense.
What are some alternatives to Amazon OpenSearch Service?: Amazon OpenSearch Service competes with Elastic, Azure AI Search and Algolia. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Amazon OpenSearch Service alternatives.