KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 | Bianca Lewis, OpenSearch Software Foundation

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Bianca Lewis, OpenSearch Software Foundation

Bianca Lewis

Executive Director OpenSearch Software Foundation

In this interview from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2026 in Amsterdam, Bianca Lewis, executive director of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, joins theCUBE's Rebecca Knight and Rob Strechay to discuss the foundation's explosive growth and OpenSearch's emergence as the de facto AI data infrastructure layer for enterprise agentic workloads. Lewis reports that downloads have surpassed 1.4 billion — up from roughly 1 billion just six months prior — with IBM joining as a premier member and four new organizations signing on in recent months, including an as-yet-una... Read more

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How is OpenSearch adapting to the recent AI "explosion," and what role does it play as an AI data infrastructure platform—particularly for agentic AI? add

How is OpenSearch evolving into an enterprise-grade infrastructure data layer for AI, and what features does it provide (e.g., agent memory, security/traceability, combined lexical and vector search, and RAG) to support agentic AI and reduce hallucinations? add

Why are organizations consolidating their stacks onto OpenSearch, and what are the main drivers behind that trend? add

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Bianca Lewis, OpenSearch Software Foundation

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to day three of theCUBE's live coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU, live in Amsterdam. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside of Rob Strechay, alongside with Rob Strechay, the principal analyst. Rob, this is it. This is our last interview of the day.

Rob Strechay

>> This is, but we always save the best for last.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed we have. With that, I would like to welcome Bianca Lewis, Executive Director OpenSearch Software Foundation. Welcome.

Bianca Lewis

>> Well, thank you so much. It's great to talk to you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yeah, and this is not your first time on theCUBE. You spoke with Rob at KubeCon North America, and back then you were talking about the explosive growth of the community. And I want to hear where the growth is today and what that looks like on the ground now.

Bianca Lewis

>> Yeah, that's a great question. I'm so excited. It seems to be hopping from KubeCon to KubeCon.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes. It feels like it, doesn't it?

Bianca Lewis

>> Right. So on that basis, we have our half-yearly biannual update, and I'm really, really glad and I'm excited to fill you in that the last time we spoke, I was pretty new. I was like one month into the job or one day into the job.

Rob Strechay

>> It felt like it, yeah. I think it was one month. I think you had a solid one month under you at that point.

Bianca Lewis

>> Yeah, quite possibly, right? And that stage, we were like pushing one billion downloads and we were in a wave of innovation, so after one month it would be difficult for me to take credit to that part of the growth. But since then, in the last half year, that growth has not only continued, but it's accelerated into the market, so we're on those figures. We're at more than 1.4 billion downloads already.

Rob Strechay

>> Wow.

Bianca Lewis

>> We've got new premier members come into the Foundation like IBM since last we spoke, pushing us forward. It's amazing to see the magic of open source once you reach that experimental phase and you move into full production phase, where you see those hyperscalers like IBMs and Amazon all working together on the same platform, and that's exciting. In the last two months, we've got four new members. The largest user of data in the world, as far as I know, has joined, but it's not yet been announced.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay. All right.

Rob Strechay

>> Well, but you're going to talk about it in a few weeks at OpenSearchCon in the EU here as well, right?

Bianca Lewis

>> Right.

Rob Strechay

>> And that's just coming around the corner.

Rebecca Knight

>> A little teaser.

Rob Strechay

>> A little teaser. So the massive discussion this week has been around AI, obviously. And really OpenSearch has really accelerated into that space as well, moving from being a project to be more like a platform. Talk to that a little bit.

Bianca Lewis

>> Yeah. I think it follows the AI explosion. At KubeCon this year, as we touched on last year, it's full of what does AI actually mean. What was interesting is about a week and a half ago in the Nvidia keynote at GTC ... I don't know if you've managed to watch that.

Rob Strechay

>> Oh, yeah. I was there, actually.

Bianca Lewis

>> Okay, so I'm going to use that as an example of now answering your question.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes.

Bianca Lewis

>> So what happened there is in the keynote, they've positioned OpenSearch as the key AI data infrastructure layer for their AI infrastructure, NemoClaw, specifically for their agentic AI.

Rob Strechay

>> Wow.

Bianca Lewis

>> And I think this is coming to a key part where enterprises with the scale of agentic AI, it's very difficult to look at AI infrastructure in silos anymore. We're not looking at a solution for observability and a solution for search and a solution to build their AI apps and a solution to monitor. I think now what we really need is we're building an AI data infrastructure that you can build those use cases on. So super exciting things with agentic AI that we're doing, platform-wide that we're getting into, and has been adopted by the hyperscaling companies.

Rebecca Knight

>> Is that asking a lot of one platform, though, in terms of one layer? What are you hearing from users about how that's working?

Bianca Lewis

>> Yeah, I think it's a general trend in the market of consolidation now. The funny thing when you're working in data is that things go in cycles, right? We consolidate, we separate. We keep the data inside, we push it outside. I think the buzz and the direction for the next or 2026 in terms of OpenSearch ... and we heard it first here on theCUBE ... is that it's not worth paying a data tax on an infrastructure layer per use case and per project but it's better to look at it systematically, and there's a few overarching reasons for that. Each of them we could discuss separately, but to give the audience a taste of that and to hear your feedback, because it's really interesting, is that we can build onto that same layer. Use the same data for things like your observability platform, everything else. Instead of paying that tax of four times of use of the same data, we're not searching query by query sequentially anymore. We can now can execute agentic AI searches and possibly get to a speed of 100,000 queries a minute or maybe even more. And running that on an old CPU-based infrastructure, siloed between different projects, just the cost effectiveness, the management overhead, means that consolidating this onto a single AI infrastructure layer is not a lot. It's making it manageable.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think when you look at it, I think bringing it all together makes a lot of sense. And I think, like you said, there's a general trend in the industry for consolidation, because people don't want to have multiple siloed approaches to everything. They want it consolidated. They want to have their vectors in the same place that they have their actual data, so that they can go really quick. Are you seeing that, really, the momentum with the enterprise has really accelerated? And like you said, one of the largest users of data coming on board and other companies that are looking at this as being an enterprise-grade platform and really accelerating into this and standardizing on it, have you seen that momentum really change over the last six months since we talked?

Bianca Lewis

>> Absolutely. It's like I touched on earlier. I think OpenSearch has graduated from an experimental platform offering great services into the production enterprise-grade standard. And by an infrastructure data layer standard, what we're referring to there is every large company in the world, like you said, the hyperscaling companies, building their use cases on, and by doing that, they're realizing what the gaps actually are. They're realizing that we don't want to run into AI before we've got the guardrails on, so what we've been building into OpenSearch are those guardrails for AI. Super interesting examples for the audience to know. What's going to be coming out soon ...

Rob Strechay

>> That's awesome.

Bianca Lewis

>> ... is that we can spin up agentic agents on AI and see GTC that we've spoken about, but when you spin up an agentic AI agent in OpenSearch, we built in memory into the agent. So what does that mean? That means a few things. That means that it's not just a transactional AI. It's not like an LLM, you ask it a question, it gives you an answer. The agent will actually have a memory, and from that memory, it'll use it to give context onto that search. We can trace that through the entire system for security as well. We can combine the agentic search then with not searching across vector search, where we search brown dog and we get brown cat and brown shoes and white dog and green dog. Okay? We will first filter that by the great power of OpenSearch's lexical search to get more accurate results, so that you've got a secure, reliable, platform-wide RAG backbone for your AI applications, which are cost effective because it's not hallucinating and it's running on the proper hardware.

Rob Strechay

>> How do you see that, organizations that are coming here to contribute, and they're going to come back to Europe for OpenSearchCon next month and things of that nature? When you start to look at these companies that are coming in, are they coming in because they're hearing that? They're like, "Hey, I want to simplify my stack, and OpenSearch helps me do that"?

Bianca Lewis

>> Yeah. I think, Rob, yes. They're coming in because they want to consolidate their stack. That's a trend that we've seen over and over again at KubeCon. I also think it's a lot to do with the open source movement now. I think it's got a lot of drivers. Operationally, the pace of innovation and development of over 400 companies developing an open search platform, which by the way, could be seen positively and negatively, right? We've got to have really good controls within the Software Foundation to make sure that the right code is being committed for the right use cases, which we fortunately do have. But I think a lot of the drivers is actually coming from the compliance and the sovereignty perspective of consolidating onto OpenSearch, because owning your data and being sovereign over your own data, the open source OpenSearch platform will let you control where your data resides, what you do with your data, and lets you be very agile to what CRA is going to mean when it starts to be implemented in September. Where am I going to control it? I think the days where they come in and they go, "Let's put data into this SaaS platform and this PaaS platform and this cloud and that," okay, all becomes now a data risk because things are moving so quickly, and OpenSearch is providing a solid foundation of flexibility for them.

Rebecca Knight

>> So as we're starting to wrap up here, Bianca, when we are together this time next year in Barcelona, or even six months from now in Salt Lake, what do you hope to be able to say about where OpenSearch is in terms of growth, in terms of community input? What do you hope to be able to say about it?

Bianca Lewis

>> Okay. I'm an optimist. I think that AI is going to be great. I think we're going to be talking about how AI is monitoring and controlling AI. And I think that we're going to be saying, now that OpenSearch has become the de facto data layer for AI infrastructure for most enterprise companies in the world, and stay tuned. In two weeks' time, we've got some announcements that are going to pertain to that. We'll see how that impacts our next KubeCon chat.

Rob Strechay

>> Absolutely. Well, we're looking forward to it, to say the least. I can't wait for the next two weeks.

Bianca Lewis

>> Okay. I'm excited, and thank you so much.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes. Thank you.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes, absolutely. Well, finally, last question, we're here at KubeCon. I mean, what are some of the most exciting things that you have seen, exciting, promising new projects or cool new tech that you would like to ... that has sparked your inspiration?

Bianca Lewis

>> Yeah. I mean, there's some pretty amazing things. I think the last KubeCon, if you remember in North America in Atlanta, it was a lot about observability, right? Like everywhere we looked was observability. What I've noticed here is that it's a lot about automating AI, and that's an exciting trend, because I don't think a lot of companies have thought about how it's all going to play with each other, so that infrastructure, so I think it's been fascinating looking at it. It's going to be more fascinating to see how all of this automating open source AI is going to play out over the next six months.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed. Fascinating. Yes.

Rob Strechay

>> I agree.

Rebecca Knight

>> Well, Bianca, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. A pleasure having you on.

Bianca Lewis

>> Thank you for having me on, and speak to you in six months.

Rebecca Knight

>> Six years in six months.

Bianca Lewis

>> Yes, six months soon. Exactly.

Rebecca Knight

>> That wraps up theCUBE's live coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU. We've been in Amsterdam all week. I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay and Paul Nashawaty. I'd also like to say a big thank you to our crew, the Henderson Brothers, and Ken and Maverick. Thank you to everyone, and thank you for all for watching our coverage. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.