Enterprises have been asking for open source infrastructure they can actually rely on in production. Today at OpenSearchCon Europe in Prague, the OpenSearch Software Foundation answered.
Bianca Lewis, Executive Director of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, opened the morning by grounding the conversation in something every enterprise team in the room recognized. The project is now at 1.5 billion downloads, with more than 500 contributing companies and a community that keeps growing. But raw momentum only takes you so far. The harder question is whether organizations can actually standardize on OpenSearch for the workloads that matter most, the ones where downtime is not an option, compliance is non-negotiable, and support needs to be more than a forum thread.
That is the gap the Foundation came to Prague to close.
The OpenSearch Software Foundation officially launched its long-term support (LTS) program, and it is a meaningful shift in what enterprise adoption of OpenSearch looks like. Bianca walked through the reality that too many teams face: they want to build on open source, but the requirements of a production environment, stable versions, security accountability, trained teams, certified support, have historically pushed them toward proprietary solutions and the lock-in that comes with them. The LTS program is built to solve that without asking enterprises to give anything up.
The details matter here. Designated LTS versions carry a minimum of 18 months of supported lifecycle, starting with OpenSearch 2.1.9 and 3.6. The Foundation scans all approximately 150 OpenSearch repositories to produce software bills of materials, giving security and compliance teams the provenance documentation they actually need. Medium and high severity vulnerabilities are required to be addressed within 60 days of public disclosure, and LTS users receive early security notifications before patches go public. Every fix goes back upstream, so improvements benefit the whole community and the codebase stays unified.
The first three accredited LTS vendors are BigData Boutique, Eliatra, and Resolve Technology. Each company has gone through an accreditation process, which means enterprises have real, certified options to evaluate rather than a single path forward.
Bianca also announced updates to the Foundation’s education and certification model. Instead of recertifying on the same material year after year, practitioners can now earn specialized certifications in areas like observability, security, and search relevance. Each specialization automatically renews the base certification, so expertise keeps pace with the platform rather than standing still.
The through line across the whole keynote was clear. Open source is the right foundation for enterprise AI infrastructure, and the LTS program removes the last reasons to hesitate. The flexibility and community that make OpenSearch worth choosing now come with the stability and accountability that production workloads require. That combination is what the OpenSearch Software Foundation has been building toward, and here at OpenSearchCon EU is where it became official.
To learn more about the LTS program or explore vendor accreditation, visit opensearch.org/long-term-support.
Read the OpenSearchCon EU Day 1 highlights post here.
