Deprecation/Removal: DEPR-170 Move from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch

[regis (Régis Behmo)]

@dave

I just wanted to briefly clarify that edX doesn’t run DocumentDB. We have our own EC2 servers running MongoDB 4.2 on Ubuntu (I logged into our AWS console just now to double check).

Sorry for my incorrect assumption; I edited my post above to avoid spreading uncertainty. I was under the impression that edX uses AWS services for all of its data storage backends.

I must say that this situation makes me even more confused:

1. Why is the Elasticsearch license change an issue, but not Mongodb?
2. If AWS support of Elasticsearch is problematic, why not self-host an ES cluster?

@dave

I would love to drop ES from the stack entirely for all the reasons you mentioned, but I was under the impression that MySQL full text search is substantially worse in terms of fetching useful results. This may not matter when the search space is relatively small (e.g. Notes), but I would be concerned about negatively impacting something like the forums search experience. Is that no longer the case?

I must say that I have too little experience with full text search in Mysql to offer a definitive solution. However, my opinion is that this deprecation discussion should include an evaluation of technical alternatives to Elasticsearch – including a Mysql-backed search engine.