Episode 2: OpenSearch Superfriends Roundup – Q4 events

Welcome to the search party episode 2, the super friend roundup.

Hello to the open search community. It’s Nate Boot here again. It’s about time that I brought another episode of the search party to your screens. I’ll warn you this time, don’t get too used to seeing my face because hopefully another Open Search ambassador will be taking on the next video for a fresh view on something cool and interesting. For now, I wanted to take the time to highlight just what a busy quarter we’ve had for the end of the year here. Between the months of November and December, we’ve had KubeCon, Knowledge Management World, and Reinvent. Just in the span of those two months, there’s a number of good interactions that we had there. I wanted to bring you some interviews for those things. And then let’s not forget about the release of Open Search 3.4, which happened over that same span of time. I’ll be talking about some of the features there.

As usual, KubeCon is heavily attended and attracts vendors and projects from all over the technical spectrum. I’ve always felt like it has become something a little bigger than just Kubernetes. I think that anyone that has been there would agree with me. It just covers so much technical space and there’s never enough time to see all of the demos and kiosks and vendors there. So, it’s a great conference with lots of people and it’s one of my favorites to go to.

I encountered three known friendlies at KubeCon. One of them we were lucky enough to be sharing our booth with. The other two were just chance encounters in the hallways. I wanted to bring those interviews to you as some of the content is pretty interesting and these are people actively using Open Search to further the goals of analytics and observability.

Welcome to KubeCon everyone. I encountered a known friendly to open search while I was out roaming the hallways looking for swag and t-shirts and bags and stress balls. Uh I’d like to introduce Ryan Pierce from Chronosphere. Uh they’re a known friendly to open search and they’ve uh they’re very well involved in the observability space. Uh how’s how’s KubeCon treating you so far?

Uh it’s great. It’s amazing to talk to so many partners, customers, uh engineers, and even competitors all in one place.

You had a couple of talks today. What were what were those on?

Uh AI native observability patterns and self-hosting LLM models specifically Gemma

If it was your call to make like what would what would be the collaboration between open search and chronosphere?

Yeah, Chronosphere is also the maintainers of fluent bit. So that’s a super common log pipeline. So we like to see anytime users are using fluent bit or chronosphere telemetry pipelines sending to open search as a destination uh and really helping with log reduction use cases enrichment and just making the data in open search more actionable at a lower cost.

Wonderful. What has been your favorite exhibit at KubeCon so far?

Hands down open search.

This year at KCON we’ve shared our booth with Elastiflow. So here with us today I have Alex Dits. He’s he’s here to uh maybe give a quick demo and talk about KubeCon a little bit. We are demoing a product here called Merman. It’s a fully open source product. We had just this week. Yes.

Murman. Yes. Um and so what that does is basically it’s an EVPF agent that sits on your Kubernetes cluster as a demon set. And so you have zero instrumentation. Uh it just works out of the box. Open search is more than just like the the free elastic, right? is really a a good bit of community coming in saying like hey I want to do this thing this thing and this thing um by the way I want to consolidate my data but the network team like it’s they have that data logged in right and that’s where we really work more with open search in terms of like figuring out hey if you want to consolidate your data on open search right your logs your metrics your your your uh traces uh we offer the network part of that solution um to make sure they actually have all the data they need and not just like here’s my big open search that has all the answers except for the literal team. They do their own thing.

I’ve run into yet another known friendly to open search. Doon Horovitz, also a CNCF ambassador and all around pretty good guy, I got to say. Are we having a great time?

Amazing time. That’s my favorite time because again, I’m a CNCF ambassador. So, uh this is the home for for us for the cloud native to join to come together. You get to meet the other contributors, the other maintainers. You get to chat with the governance committee members with the TOC members with the folks from the user groups. It’s really amazing that’s the place to be to to chat about that and many good things come out of these that you don’t get on the online medium so you you keep in touch with these folks over GitHub and over CNCF Slack or others but here suddenly when you get the folks together and chatting face to face things happen.

After KubeCon we took a short trip up to Washington DC where open search had a booth at knowledge management world. There was a subset of that called the enterprise search and discovery where we had a booth talking about open search. There were a couple of known friendlies but no interviews to be spoken of but I did capture some good pictures of some known open search super friends. We did have a good time in Washington DC. Everyone was very nice at knowledge management world and there were lots of people that were very eager to ask questions about open search and I think that we got a great chance to share what it is that we are and any builders that were in the audience there or browsing through the booths hopefully found something interesting with open search.

So chat we got to talk about reinvent for a couple minutes here. Reinvent has been the most psychologically overwhelming conference that I’ve ever been to, but it’s impossible to go to without at least feeling some of that excitement. You get there on day one, you can literally feel the ground shaking from all the people walking around trying to find their booths and all the cool swag. And I have to say, reinvent this year was quite special. There was a book release around the same time for which we had all three authors around to have a book signing and give away several copies of the book for free. It was a very appealing thing to see having a line of 15 people deep waiting to get their own copy of this free book with the authors to sign it to them and shake their hands and offer encouragement. It was great.

Of course, Las Vegas is a wild city. I get a little overwhelmed there, but of course I got to see some of the sites and I may or may not have done some karaoke. You might just get to see it yourself if you join us next time.

During all of these conferences in December, we also managed to launch Open Search 3.4.0. This particular update comes with a couple of UX improvements meant to help you roll out your Aentic AI, various extensions and improvements to the ppl query language and some speed increases for certain query types by leveraging the ability of Java to be polymorphic in its behavior by using the lucine bulk scoring API to implement some custom classes.

It’s a great release. Please check out the blog for it and get yourself ready to see what’s going to be on the road map for 3.5. So, like I said, it’s been a busy end of year for us here at the Open Search Project. I wanted to thank you for coming back to watch another episode and please stay tuned. Not only do we have the potential for another Open Search Ambassador to be delivering these videos, but also with a new year, we’re going to have a new road map and plenty of new things to see. So, this is Nate Boot, Open Search Ambassador, signing off uh for the Open Search Super Friends Roundup. Thanks everyone.