I would question the assumption that this is “not suitable for production use” means “everything is broken and we're way behind” rather than, say, “we are being extremely conservative because our customers will expect support as soon as we say it's production ready and we need to test every upgrade scenario for our large number of existing customers”. The AWS-managed ElasticSearch seems to be pretty popular and I would expect them to be as conservative about new offerings as they are with, say, RDS.

6 months from start to prod is... not bad at all? You must be a wizard programmer if that is your typical turnaround time.

I don't remember AWS saying something like "it will be ready in weeks" in Jan...

Given how poorly of a job Elastic themselves did with keeping the full ecosystem of tools working in lockstep for YEARS, I'm sure Amazon will do fine.

I remember all through Elasticsearch 5 where none of their packaged Kibana dashboards flippin' worked.

> they've underestimated the amount of work required to package and distribute a product as complex as Elasticsearch

The bulk of the work thus far has been to strip out the non-OSS components ("X-pack") and the many references to it, nothing to do with packaging, distributing, or even maintaining and developing features.

https://discuss.opendistrocommunity.dev/t/preparing-opensear...

I for one will be happy when those are taken out. So many headaches trying to get bloated Kibana to start as a docker container before realizing that some random x-pack-disable flag needs to be set for it to start without a random error.

I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. Now that the fork is publicly available, others can contribute to get it ready, which wasn't possible until now.

Yes, others can contribute, but significant feature development on large-scale OSS projects tends to be driven by developers paid to work on the project full-time and coordinated by an organized steering committee with clear governance (or company if the product is owned by a single company). I don't see any of that in place for OpenSearch and getting that all started up is not at all a trivial endeavor.

I would assume they’re doing more than just packaging.

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct

The fork announcement was announced as a response to the Elastic stuff. I don't think they made any predictions about when it'd be ready in that blog post, so I'm not sure why they would've underestimated anything?