Join Bianca Lewis of the OpenSearch Software Foundation as they discuss the highlights and key insights from the recent KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 event in Atlanta. The conversation, hosted by Rob Strechay, director at theCUBE Research, delves into the exciting developments and vibrant community surrounding OpenSearch.
Lewis, who recently took on their role as the executive director at OpenSearch Software Foundation, shares their extensive involvement in the project, highlighting their commercial background and strong ties to the open-source movement. The discussion covers recent developments, including OpenSearch's expansion to over 3,000 contributors and the strategic growth of its community. With a focus on phase two of the project's evolution, the conversation touches on vendor neutrality and community-centric growth. Key topics include the transformative role of artificial intelligence (AI) in search landscapes and the significant increase in OpenSearch's ecosystem.
The discussion offers insights into the future of OpenSearch, emphasizing its capability as an AI-native database and the unparalleled innovation stemming from its open-source roots. Lewis highlights notable advancements such as core engine enhancements, security plugins, and the significant increase in project downloads. The conversation underscores the momentum driving OpenSearch, with notable contributions towards AI and observability.
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Bianca Lewis, OpenSearch Software Foundation
In this KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America interview, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay speaks with Alon Horev, co-founder and chief technology officer at Vast Data, to unpack how Kubernetes and cloud-native standards are powering real-time AI at the edge and across hybrid environments. Horev explains why Kubernetes is the “orchestration platform of today” and why open protocols (such as S3 and Kafka) are essential to avoid product lock-in while enabling developer choice and portability.
Horev discusses platform engineering, multi-tenancy and zero-trust as foundations for self-service data pipelines and governance at scale. Lessons learned from open source-centric customers on building consistent platforms across locations are explored, as well as discussions on Vast’s v5.4 data engine update that introduces serverless functions and triggers to invoke compute on data in real time – vital for use cases from retail to smart cities. Horev also breaks down modern Retrieval-Augemented Generation, or RAG, pipelines and vector databases, why enterprises need a consolidated stack to operationalize agentic AI and the centrality of observability for performance, cost and quality – complete with traces and logs to monitor and compare releases without costly re-runs.
In this post-KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA interview, Bianca Lewis, executive director of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay to discuss the explosive growth and future roadmap of the OpenSearch project. Lewis shares insights from her first few months leading the foundation, highlighting a massive surge in community engagement that has seen contributors grow from 200 to over 3,000 and project downloads hit 1.4 billion. The conversation explores the foundation's transition into "Phase 2," which prioritizes vendor-neutral sustainabili...Read more
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What has been the experience of the new executive director of OpenSearch in the first few months of their role?add
What is the individual's background and experience in the fields of commercial and open source software?add
What are some of the different use cases for OpenSearch that have emerged from recent discussions and meetings?add
What are some of the ways OpenSearch is being utilized according to the discussions at KubeCon?add
What developments and partnerships are currently happening within the OpenSearch Software Foundation?add
>> Hello, and welcome to this post-KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2025 follow-up. I'm Rob Strechay, and today we're going to be talking about OpenSearch and what happened at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon back in Atlanta. Today, to help me do this, I'm really excited to be joined by Bianca Lewis, who's executive director OpenSearch Software Foundation. Welcome onboard, Bianca.
Bianca Lewis
>> Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Rob. Look, it's super exciting to be onboard. Have been a long time coming.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. Again, it was exciting to catch up with you at KubeCon. I think you recently became the executive director for OpenSearch. How has the role and the experience in the first few months of this new journey been treating you?
Bianca Lewis
>> It's a great question. It feels like it's spinning. I'm about two and a half months into the role. However, I think it's true to say I've been involved with OpenSearch from the very first day of the project. Well, we may market into that a little bit later on. But how's it treating me? When I'm come in to formally be the executive director of OpenSearch Software Foundation, it's been a year after it was donated to the Linux Foundation. A lot of the credibility, the groundwork of vendor neutral sustainability, and then those parametrics and parameters already well on its way when I joined. When I joined, already there was a very vibrant community, growing community. New lease of life, I could say, in the fields of AI search, the way that observability is changing and everything else. But when I come in, it's now changed from the last year from I think about 200 odd contributors. And by the way, there's an OpenSearch dashboard that we can cover this, but it's changed from about 200 contributors to over 3,000 contributors. It's gone to 1.4 billion project downloads today. The ecosystem now consists of almost 100 solution providers. So that the OpenSearch as a project, as a platform has become really, really huge. The first thing I found where I joined my first couple of months has been getting my head around just the power and size of this project, which is just undergoing this massive wave of innovation. And then it's about, the next phase is about phase two after the credibility of something completely vendor neutral, to give some foundational steps to make it scalable, to give companies a place where they can freely contribute to the success of the project, grow the ecosystem around, and give a framework that OpenSearch can become really an open source suite where you can build multiple use cases driven truly by community without any vendor interest. And I've just been making those plans. I've been talking to many, many members of the community, many people at the Lilly's Foundation who've helped me a lot. As one as many people like yourself, Rob, who give me pointers from different experiences. And it's about building phase two.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah, totally agree. Again, as you look at it, you had a fantastic background. What do you think most prepared you for taking on the executive director in this open source world? And as you came in, like you said, you've been around this project, but give the audience a little bit of your background that prepared you for this.
Bianca Lewis
>> Yeah. I think it's well-known that anybody that does a LinkedIn search, that I came from a commercial background. Definitely coming into the open source world dedicated in the Lilly's Foundation and Open Source Software Foundation is a new challenge for me on a personal level as well. Where I really love this challenge though is the fact that, to be restrictive in my answer, I started on search technologies way back in 2015 as the first sales manager to build the sales teams and the business team at a company called Logz.io. And that provided front-end service for Elasticsearch as a service. It was a SaaS company. But it was open source under Apache v2 at the time. And I got introduced to what an open source go-to-market model was and how that interfaces with the commercial vendor ecosystem and how companies can really have great foundation and commercial interest in using open source as a business model to build their business on. I really loved that. A few years later, I joined on the founding team of a company called Opster, which took it from use cases where we largely dealt with large observability clusters, into more the application and mission-critical search operations of Elasticsearch. And as we know what happened in 2021, when Elasticsearch license changed from Apache v2 into a more restrictive license, which was no longer open source. And that was the birth of OpenSearch. And suddenly our company is supporting one platform, we now supported two platforms. We always joked like overnight we doubled in size. However, a few years later, this company made an exit. It got bought by that same vendor that closed. Well, it not closed, but made the license for Elasticsearch at the time more proprietary. And when the company got purchased I faced a time where I had to reflect on what I really wanted, what I really believed in, in terms of the future of data platforms and technology. And at the end of the day, open source for me will always win, especially if you're dealing in the realms of foundational platforms within a business to build the applications on. I think that the fact that the community drives what they need, the fact the community of eyes on the project, and the pace of development can be so much more than any proprietary approach. I've got nothing against, I spend most of my life there. But I found that the world of open source and my particular background of getting dedicated into open source has prepared me perfectly for this challenge that we spoke about at the beginning.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. No, I agree. I think, again, and a shout-out to Asaf Yigal, buddy of mine from the Logz. I know he's over at Logz still. And again, when you look at it open... We agree, I think open really wins when you start to look at it and how the models and organizations and the contribution, but it really takes community. And I think a big focus, while we were down in Atlanta, was the fact that it was your first KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. When you look at the community and you look at being part of OpenSearch Software Foundation at that event, how did you see that event going for you? How was it for you?
Bianca Lewis
>> First of all, I love this KubeCon. It's not my first KubeCon, but I found... And I don't know if you found it Rob, but I found a great energy there this year. I think there were about 9,000 attendees. And what I think I really loved about it was, first of all, it was vendor neutral. And that by definition, of course, gives a space for more vendors to have a voice of how they see the future of technology. Because all the commercial vendors that generally come into the community of cloud-native technologies and develop on that in order to innovate what our future is going to look like.
I think KubeCon this year was, in a way, better than any KubeCon North America I've been at previously, which is a great hats off to the cloud-native and NCNCF foundations. I had some really interesting conversations. And what I noticed, a lot of the interest at this KubeCon was around monitoring to observability and the change that this whole landscape is undergoing at the moment. I won't go into too many details at the moment, but it's super interesting to dig into that. Perhaps at another time. Lots of AI. Every platform that you would see at KubeCon had loads of AI in it, which was not always easy to explain the differences or the use cases of each one. But I have to admit that a large part of my KubeCon this year was in meeting rooms talking to very smart, wise people, and just learning from everyone in the community how the open source technologies are really driving innovation at a pace that I've never seen before.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. No, I think, again, you had some great stuff going on. OpenSearch, the project got to version 3.3.2. You've also had some core engine enhancements. You were at ML Commons, there was neural search, there's KNN, security plugins, and way more. And like you said, celebrating the one year anniversary back in August, I think it was saying, and I think this talks to some of the momentum you've had, that 78% year-over-year increase in downloads. And you were saying just a phenomenal amount earlier. Did you come out of this with seeing the community even leaning in more as you came through this? Because I know you were in meeting rooms. Trust me, I was sitting on a desk the entire time. But what we like to say is that when you get into the hallway and you're having these conversations as you walk through, did you see people... Because like you said, OpenSearch and data platforms really are the underpinning of AI, and AI was such a big discussion there. Was that a lot of the takeaways that you had coming out of there? Or, what were your big takeaways coming out KubeCon this year?
Bianca Lewis
>> It definitely was an eye-opener in a lot of ways. I think that one of the most exciting things that I've heard from all the meetings, if you talk about conversational chats that you have with people that you meet in the hallways, and also in the meeting rooms, is just how many different use cases people are using OpenSearch for today. As I spoke about my background largely and observability in search, within that the landscape has changed tremendously. Observability has become a lot closer to development. Has become instead of a cost-centered driver for business decisions even. The whole landscape has changed. And search, as you mentioned before, the search landscape has changed with the event of LLMs and AI, and agentic search, et cetera. Great, but it didn't stop there. The conversations carried on at KubeCon because people were using it more and more for their security monitoring, and they were using it more for building AI applications with OpenSearch as an AI-native database. And I think the approach to be able to control your technology based on open source, on OpenSearch especially, control the cost and control the functionality. And having all of that innovation on all different use cases, which is like we said, to recap observability, search, AI application, security. And you can use it on the same data retrieval layer of OpenSearch. It was an eye-opener just how people are using this technology.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah, I agree. Again, when you start to look at how people are pushing in on the different technology and they're really focused on how they can leverage it, observability and logs, metrics and traces, and bringing the security stuff together with the infrastructure stuff, and being able to make business decisions and have understanding of business outcomes has been great there. As we roll into the end of here, what do you hope that you can't say today but you want to say maybe in Amsterdam or next year in Salt Lake when we're together about where OpenSearch has gotten to?
Bianca Lewis
>> Yeah, that's great question, because you got two landmarks half a year and a year away.
Rob Strechay
>> Yeah. Well, it feels like Amsterdam is literally around the corner. I'm sitting there going, "Oh, my God, I have to register already." I'm like, it's a little... I'm jumping the gun, but it's four months away. It's not even six.
Bianca Lewis
>> Exactly. Exactly. Time flies when you're having fun. I think what's interesting about that question is that there's two parallel answer tracks to the question. The one is, well, what am I going to say about the OpenSearch Software Foundation, and what are we going to be talking about the platform advancement and what that's going to look like in the world of OpenSearch? Definitely, if we're talking about on OpenSearch Software Foundation level, as we mentioned earlier, we plan to go into our phase two here. And already we've got very exciting premium members that have signed up and who are innovating at a pace which is almost unbelievable. We've got obviously AWS and we've got IBM, which we announced just before KubeCon. We've got SAP, we've got Uber. And we are working very, very hard to innovate in all those different use cases with our partners. We're giving that framework accreditation, growing the vendor ecosystem, giving more value to the community, which we won't get into details. Our plan in six months, to make some really, really meaningful announcements on the way that companies can really join the OpenSearch community and gain the maximum benefit from working on that. Now, on the platform front, in the next six months, obviously we now have an eight-week release cycle. Which is not by coincidence, it's driven by the community who sits on our TSC, our technical steering committee, who make these decisions. They thought that an eight-week one is a great pace innovation. Of course, I agree with that. And 3.3 almost shaped what we're going to be talking about in six months time. I think you mentioned it as well. Where in 3.3 now the discovery tab within OpenSearch has been released where you can see your logs and your traces and your metrics all in a single interface. And what is great about that is it provides the context to the data in order to make quicker and better and more accurate decisions. Because, of course, every log will belong to a trace and have associated metrics. It's not three different datasets, like we treat them with VOSS. On the search front, of course, we've got other capabilities as well, which are super exciting. For the first time, we've got agentic AI as GA. And what that means is that it empowers the non-technical people, who don't necessarily know how to formulate queries to ask of their data, the answers to the questions that they need to base their decisions on. Now they can write in plain English or on the language of choice and they can say, listen, why did conversions in Berlin drop last week Tuesday? And OpenSearch will create the necessary queries, query the data, and bring back the answer. It democratizes the way that people can actually use their data. And in Amsterdam, we are going to be way beyond 3.3. If we do the math, we should be at 3.5, 3.6 by then, and have a load of feedback and direction of how that is now starting to change the platform and the use of unified contextual AI-empowered data. When we get to OpenSearchCon North America, one year away, I'm going to go more on the larger prediction front, which is a little bit counterintuitive as well. I think we've got so many different elements and so much innovation that is happening there that we're going to see a few trends by then, which I think will be more concrete. And maybe we can meet up after KubeCon to see how accurate I was. The one thing which I think is going to happen is that as more things change, nothing will change.
Rob Strechay
>> Yep. I agree with that.
Bianca Lewis
>> The pace of change is so exciting and moves so quickly that we are actually going to see that we're still using search and we're still using observability in much the same way. And the very foundational technologies that we've had are still underpinning all the innovations. I think I drew the analogy of the car did not make the wheel obsolete.
Rob Strechay
>> I like that. I like that. And we definitely will have to sit down again and see how good our predictions are. Funny enough, I think AI is still going to be a thing in a year, to put it mildly. I think we'll still be talking about this. Hey, Bianca, thanks for coming onboard, this has been great. And we'll definitely do this again. I really appreciate you coming onboard. This is a lot of fun.
Bianca Lewis
>> Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Thanks, Rob. It's been a great chat.
Rob Strechay
>> Thank you for watching this post-KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2025 episode of theCUBE, a leader in tech analysis and news. Stay tuned.
Rob Strechay