OpenSearch 3.0 Unveiled: Vector DB on Steroids and More - OpenObservability Talks S6E01

OpenSearch has become a cornerstone of open source search and observability, empowering developers and organizations to derive meaningful insights from unstructured data at scale.

The past year marks a significant milestone in its journey, with OpenSearch officially joining The Linux Foundation, further cementing its position in the open source ecosystem.

Now, after two years of 2.x, the next major release is here, and it brings significant advancements in performance, data management, vector database functionality, and much more. In this episode we dive into the 3.0 release, across lexical, semantic, and hybrid search, vector database improvements, observability capabilities, performance boosts, and much more. We also look at the community and ecosystem, the recent move of the project under The Linux Foundation, and some of the interesting use cases out there.  

Our guests for this episode are Carl Meadows, Chair of the Governing Board of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, and Pallavi Priyadarshini, member of the Technical Steering Committee and the OpenSearch 3.0 release manager.

The episode was live-streamed on 9 June 2025 and the video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4T-ksTAmxg

You can read the recap post: https://medium.com/p/fb526e0d44e5/

Show Notes:

00:00 - intro

03:30 - OpenSearch joins the Linux Foundation

06:05 - the community and Technical Steering Committee

11:39 - why now 3.0?

13:53 - performance improvements

17:55 - vector database and MCP for agentic AI support

23:20 - what's new with observability

30:14 - Discover UI view and anomaly detection

33:55 - the vision for OpenSearch and differentiation

37:33 - Data Prepper ingestion component

44:28 - gRPC and Protobuf support

49:47 - 3.1 release and the 3.x line

55:25 - where to follow and join the community

1:03:12 - outro

Resources:

• OpenSearch 3.0 announcement blog: https://opensearch.org/blog/unveiling-opensearch-3-0/

• OpenSearch public roadmap: https://github.com/orgs/opensearch-project/projects/220 

• OpenSearchCon and other events: https://opensearch.org/events/

• New Observability Special Interest Group: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7336739972877537281/

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Dotan Horovits

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Twitter: @horovits

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/horovits

Mastodon: @horovits@fosstodon

BlueSky: @horovits.bsky.social

Carl Meadows

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Twitter: https://x.com/Carl_F_Meadows

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlfmeadows/

Pallavi Priyadarshini

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pallavipr/

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