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OpenSearchCon Europe 2026 has ended
16-17 April 2026 | Prague, Czechia 
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IMPORTANT NOTE: Timing of sessions and room locations are subject to change.

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Thursday, April 16
 

08:00 CEST

Meet the Ambassadors + Attendee Breakfast
Thursday April 16, 2026 08:00 - 09:00 CEST
Join us for a Meet the Ambassador's Breakfast on Day 1 of OpenSearchCon Europe. Learn about our current Ambassadors

Light breakfast will be provided. 
Thursday April 16, 2026 08:00 - 09:00 CEST
Main Foyer

08:00 CEST

Registration + Badge Pick-up
Thursday April 16, 2026 08:00 - 19:00 CEST
Thursday April 16, 2026 08:00 - 19:00 CEST
Main Foyer

08:00 CEST

Coat + Bag Check
Thursday April 16, 2026 08:00 - 19:30 CEST

Thursday April 16, 2026 08:00 - 19:30 CEST
Studio A

09:00 CEST

Keynote: Opening Remarks - Bianca Lewis, Executive Director, OpenSearch Software Foundation, The Linux Foundation
Thursday April 16, 2026 09:00 - 09:05 CEST

Speakers
avatar for Bianca Lewis

Bianca Lewis

Executive Director, OpenSearch Software Foundation

Thursday April 16, 2026 09:00 - 09:05 CEST
Bohemia 2

09:05 CEST

Keynote: OpenSearch in the Agentic Era - Carl Meadows, Director of Product for Amazon OpenSearch Services and the OpenSearch Project, Amazon Web Services
Thursday April 16, 2026 09:05 - 09:30 CEST
Join Carl Meadows, Chair of the OpenSearch Software Foundation Governing Board and OpenSearch Product Lead for Amazon Web Services, as he explores how OpenSearch is leading the transformation to agentic AI. 

Discover how OpenSearch's vector database foundation and open-source community uniquely position the project for the agentic era. Carl will reveal how AI agents are democratizing search development—enabling developers to build production-ready applications in minutes without specialized expertise—and transforming observability for AI-powered systems.

With a growing base of contributors and accelerating momentum in 2026, the OpenSearch community continues to drive innovation. Carl will welcome new OpenSearch Software Foundation members, unveil new agentic tools, and share his vision for how OpenSearch is empowering builders to accelerate development, unlock new capabilities, and deliver the next generation of AI-powered search and observability solutions.

Speakers
avatar for Carl Meadows

Carl Meadows

Director of Product, Amazon Web Services
Carl Meadows is Director of Product at AWS for Amazon OpenSearch Service and is the board chair for the OpenSearch Software Foundation at the Linux Foundation.

Carl has over twenty-five years in product management developing enterprise software and cloud services. Prior to joining AWS, Carl held product management leadership roles at Engine Yard, SunGard Availability Services, SoftLayer/IBM and Symantec. He holds a BA from Berklee Colleg... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 09:05 - 09:30 CEST
Bohemia 2

09:30 CEST

Keynote: The Next Generation of Enterprise Search: Intent‑Aware, Hybrid, and Open - Dom Couldwell, Product Manager for OpenSearch, IBM
Thursday April 16, 2026 09:30 - 10:00 CEST
Enterprise search is undergoing a fundamental shift. As user expectations rise and AI agents increasingly become primary consumers of search, the challenge is no longer simply finding information—but delivering the right context to drive better decisions, actions, and business outcomes. This keynote explores how enterprise search is evolving from keyword retrieval toward intent‑aware, adaptive systems that balance relevance, explainability, governance, and cost.

Drawing on IBM’s long‑standing commitment to open source and its growing leadership in the OpenSearch community, we present a practical framework for next‑generation enterprise search built around three forms of intent: query intent, journey intent, and product intent. We examine why “more AI” or vector‑only approaches are often insufficient, how traditional lexical techniques remain critical when blended with semantic search, and why understanding exploration versus exploitation is essential for designing effective search journeys and measuring ROI.

The session highlights how OpenSearch enables smarter context through hybrid retrieval, dynamic relevance, and observable, explainable pipelines—capabilities that are increasingly critical as search moves from human interfaces to agent‑driven experiences. We also explore emerging community trends, including agent builders and teams migrating from vector‑only systems, and preview upcoming OpenSearch innovations that support AI‑native, governed, and cost‑efficient enterprise search.

Attendees will leave with a clear mental model for modern enterprise search, actionable guidance for balancing innovation with fundamentals, and an understanding of why OpenSearch—developed in the open—plays a foundational role in the future of enterprise and agentic search.
Speakers
avatar for Dom Couldwell

Dom Couldwell

Product Manager for OpenSearch, IBM
Thursday April 16, 2026 09:30 - 10:00 CEST
Bohemia 2

10:00 CEST

All-Attendee Photo 📸
Thursday April 16, 2026 10:00 - 10:05 CEST
Smile for the camera! 📸
Join our all-attendee photo immediately following Keynotes on Day 1, 16 April. 
Thursday April 16, 2026 10:00 - 10:05 CEST
Bohemia 2

10:00 CEST

Break
Thursday April 16, 2026 10:00 - 10:20 CEST
Thursday April 16, 2026 10:00 - 10:20 CEST
Main Foyer

10:00 CEST

Solutions Showcase
Thursday April 16, 2026 10:00 - 19:20 CEST

Thursday April 16, 2026 10:00 - 19:20 CEST
Main Foyer

10:20 CEST

Beyond Hot Spots: Revolutionising OpenSearch Performance Through Heat-Aware Operations - Gaurav Bafna & Arpit Bandejiya, Amazon
Thursday April 16, 2026 10:20 - 11:00 CEST
In large-scale OpenSearch clusters, uneven workload distribution creates performance bottlenecks that traditional shard allocation strategies can't address. We present a groundbreaking approach to cluster optimisation through heat-aware operations, transforming how OpenSearch handles resource utilisation and workload distribution.

Our solution introduces a smart heat detection system that monitors cluster health across multiple dimensions - CPU, memory, I/O, and query patterns. By analysing both node and shard-level metrics using statistical methods, we can identify and classify various patterns of resource imbalance.

Key innovations include:
🔹 Multi-dimensional heat scoring for precise hotspot detection
🔹 Pattern recognition for automated root cause analysis
🔹 Intelligent rebalancing recommendations
🔹 Predictive scaling suggestions

Through real-world examples, we'll demonstrate how this system:
- Reduces query latency
- Optimises resource utilisation across clusters
- Prevents cascading performance issues
- Enables proactive capacity planning

Join us to explore how heat-aware operations are setting new standards for OpenSearch cluster performance and reliability.
Speakers
avatar for Arpit Bandejiya

Arpit Bandejiya

SDE II, AWS
Arpit Bandejiya is a Software Development Engineer ll at AWS, working in Opensearch. Over the past three years, he has focused on Shard management, scalability and performance optimization. His interests lie in distributed systems and building high performance scalable infrastruc... Read More →
avatar for Gaurav Bafna

Gaurav Bafna

Senior Software Engineer, Amazon
Gaurav Bafna is a Senior Engineer with Amazon OpenSearch Service. He is excited about scaling challenges with distributed systems. He has been with OpenSearch team for 8 years and has a good operating experience with OpenSearch clusters. He is an active contributor and a maintainer... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 10:20 - 11:00 CEST
Bohemia 1
  Analytics + Security + Observability
  • Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:20 CEST

Building RAG With OpenSearch ML Plugins: From PDFs To Voice-Enabled Search - Kushagra Sharma, Genesys
Thursday April 16, 2026 10:20 - 11:00 CEST
OpenSearch's ML Commons plugin enables deploying embedding models directly on your cluster—yet many developers still rely on external services. This session demonstrates building a complete RAG system using OpenSearch as both vector store and ML inference engine.

We'll cover deploying sentence-transformer models via ML Commons, processing PDFs, generating embeddings within OpenSearch, configuring knn_vector indices, and implementing semantic search. The highlight: voice search using local Whisper (STT) model creating a fully self-contained system.

What I hope to achieve: Share practical patterns for leveraging OpenSearch's ML capabilities and gather community feedback.

What attendees gain: Step-by-step knowledge to deploy ML models on OpenSearch, build RAG pipelines, and integrate local voice processing—reproducible techniques they can apply immediately.

How this helps the ecosystem: Showcases OpenSearch's native ML features, reducing dependency on external services. Demonstrates OpenSearch as a complete AI platform, not just a search engine.

Target audience: Developers building RAG applications, OpenSearch operators exploring ML capabilities.
Speakers
avatar for Kushagra Sharma

Kushagra Sharma

Staff Software Engineer, Genesys
I'm a Staff/Lead Software Engineer at Genesys, working on the Conversational AI team. I build intelligent search and knowledge systems using OpenSearch, focusing on vector search and RAG pipelines. I'm passionate about exploring OpenSearch's AI/ML capabilities—particularly ML Commons... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 10:20 - 11:00 CEST
Bohemia 3
  Operating OpenSearch
  • Presentation Slides Attached Yes

10:20 CEST

Beyond Benchmarks: Real-World AI Search Performance in OpenSearch (Lucene Vs Faiss Vs JVector) - Fernando Rejon Barrera, Zeta Alpha
Thursday April 16, 2026 10:20 - 11:00 CEST
Benchmarks produce clean numbers - but do they reflect what actually happens when users apply filters, facets, and hybrid queries in realistic document collections in production?

In this session, we evaluate the real-world performance of three vector search options available to OpenSearch users: Lucene’s built-in HNSW, the Faiss engine integration, and jVector, an open-source vector search plugin. While all engines publish compelling benchmark results and advertise strong scalability, most existing comparisons focus on isolated ANN performance rather than realistic query patterns.

Using identical datasets, queries, and filter selectivity, we examine how latency, recall, and throughput change once Boolean filters, aggregations, and hybrid retrieval are introduced. We break down where performance differences originate inside OpenSearch - including index construction behavior, memory usage, concurrency, and merge strategies.

Attendees will leave with practical guidance on when each engine is the right default choice, how to interpret vendor and community benchmarks critically, and how to design vector search evaluations that reflect real production systems.
Speakers
avatar for Fernando Rejon Barrera

Fernando Rejon Barrera

CTO, Zeta Alpha
Fernando is the CTO of Zeta Alpha, an Amsterdam-based startup helping High-Tech and R&D Enterprises take their Generative AI projects to production. With a PhD in theoretical physics and a hacker (builder) past, Fernando brings a unique blend of theoretical knowledge and hands-on... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 10:20 - 11:00 CEST
Bohemia 2

11:10 CEST

Running OpenSearch in the Real World: Migration, Mistakes and Maturity - Tom Snuverink & Marco Arts, Schuberg Philis
Thursday April 16, 2026 11:10 - 11:30 CEST
This talk shares a hands-on journey of building and operating a large-scale OpenSearch platform in a strictly on-premises, VM-based environment. What started as an urgent Splunk replacement evolved into a Managed Detection and Response (MDR) logging platform for high ingestion rates (~40GB to 1.2TB/day per customer). 

The session focuses on real operational challenges and experiences: sizing and sharding decisions, gaps in official documentation, and the realities of owning OpenSearch end-to-end. Initially using Terraform to deploy and manual bootstrapping.

The talk includes a migration failure story from our biggest cluster, caused by accidental double ingestion, bad sizing and snapshot-induced OOMs.

At the end we have automated deployments, bootstrapping, ISM, snapshots, tiering, SSO-based access control, searchable-snapshots(on-prem S3) and automation. Due to limitations in ISM we built a custom lifecycle automation script via an operator-like pipeline and an opensearchcli binary.

Attendees gain a realistic view of running OpenSearch at scale on-prem, including lessons learned the hard way.
Speakers
avatar for Tom Snuverink

Tom Snuverink

Mission Critical Engineer, Schuberg Philis
avatar for Marco Arts

Marco Arts

Mission Critical Engineer, Schuberg Philis
In tech for 17 years, working as a DevOps engineer.
Focused on HA-solutions and automation as a a core concept, with lots of on-prem experience.
Thursday April 16, 2026 11:10 - 11:30 CEST
Bohemia 1
  Operating OpenSearch
  • Presentation Slides Attached Yes

11:10 CEST

Ingesting Observability Data: OpenTelemetry Collector or Data Prepper? - Karsten Schnitter, SAP SE
Thursday April 16, 2026 11:10 - 11:50 CEST
Choosing the right ingestion tool for OpenSearch is a critical architectural decision. Should you use the OpenTelemetry Collector or Data Prepper? This session provides a definitive guide to answering that question, helping you design a pipeline that is both powerful and efficient.

This talk moves beyond theory into a practical comparison of design philosophies. We'll contrast the Collector's strength as a universal, lightweight agent with a vast component ecosystem, against Data Prepper's role as a purpose-built pipeline engine, optimized for powerful transformations and accessible stateful processing.

To make this concrete, the session will showcase the setup of a complete hybrid pipeline, walking through the necessary configurations. We will then deconstruct a real-world APM pipeline architecture to show how Collector and Data Prepper fulfill distinct roles in processing data before it reaches OpenSearch.

You'll leave with a clear decision framework, proven architectural patterns, and a blueprint for building your own scalable observability pipelines.
Speakers
avatar for Karsten Schnitter

Karsten Schnitter

Software Architect, SAP SE
Karsten is a Software Architect at SAP. He works in the observabilty area of the SAP Business Technology Platform. Karsten is a member of the OpenSearch technical steering committee and maintainer of the Data Prepper project. He is also a member of the OpenSearch TAG Observabilit... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 11:10 - 11:50 CEST
Bohemia 3
  Analytics + Security + Observability
  • Presentation Slides Attached Yes

11:10 CEST

From Embeddings To Index: A Practitioner's Guide To Domain-Adapted Neural Search - Samuel Herman, Oracle
Thursday April 16, 2026 11:10 - 11:50 CEST
Off-the-shelf embedding models underperform on domain-specific queries, and "just fine-tune it" fails for proprietary terminology. Why? Standard fine-tuning can't teach models vocabulary they've never seen. The embedding gap costs 40-60% of search relevance; while ANN indexing only costs 1-5%.

In this talk, we'll walk through end-to-end domain-adapted neural search—from embedding adaptation to index optimization. We'll examine a multi-stage pipeline (vocabulary extension → domain warmup → dictionary pre-training → multi-objective fine-tuning) with experiments showing each stage's impact.

But embedding adaptation is half the battle. When embeddings change, what happens to your index? We'll explore when changes require full rebuilds versus adaptive quantization—a mechanism using reconstruction error tracking to maintain optimal compression without costly rebuilds.

Attendees will learn why fine-tuning fails, diagnostic frameworks for embedding quality, and practical strategies for continuously-updated production indices.
Speakers
avatar for Samuel Herman

Samuel Herman

Architect - AI, Vector, Oracle
Samuel is an OpenSearch Commiter, Maintainer, Technical Steering Committee member.
He is currently the architect of DataStax OpenSearch offering and previously Architect Of OCI Search Services and OCI Observability.
Thursday April 16, 2026 11:10 - 11:50 CEST
Bohemia 2

12:00 CEST

A Brief Guide to Secure Agentic Knowledge Retrieval - Christian Gross, RheinInsights GmbH
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:00 - 12:20 CEST
Agents and AI systems require answers that are reliable, precise and fast. In enterprise and organizational environments, these answers also must be secure. In fact, vector databases and search engines provide rapid access to knowledge. But a key challenge remains: how to correctly apply the permission models of underlying content sources within hybrid and semantic search workflows?

This presentation outlines how organizational knowledge can be securely integrated into OpenSearch. We will walk through how permissions need to be modeled, how authentication can be applied, and how these constraints propagate through the search and retrieval pipeline. In addition, we will show how prompt and query preprocessing can improve reliability and precision, particularly for agentic and AI‑driven use cases.
Speakers
avatar for Christian Gross

Christian Gross

Co-Founder, RheinInsights GmbH
Christian is a veteran in the enterprise search field with more than a decade of hands‑on experience building search solutions for large organizations.

After completing his PhD and postdoctoral research, he joined the vendor‑independent search specialist Raytion in 2011 where

... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:00 - 12:20 CEST
Bohemia 1
  Search & Apache Lucene
  • Presentation Slides Attached Yes

12:00 CEST

Late Interaction Retrieval in Practice: Implications for OpenSearch-Based Search Systems - Francisco Losada de la Rosa, AWS
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:00 - 12:20 CEST
Dense vector retrieval based on single embeddings has become the default approach for semantic search, but it introduces well-known limitations when dealing with long documents, fine-grained relevance signals, or complex queries. Late interaction retrieval models address these issues by allowing queries and documents to interact at a more granular level, typically across token-level or sub-vector representations, while remaining more scalable than full cross-encoders.

This session explores late interaction models from a systems and search-engine perspective, focusing on what it would take to support them efficiently in OpenSearch-based architectures. It discusses indexing and storage strategies for multi-vector representations, candidate generation and pruning techniques, and the role of late interaction scoring as an intermediate stage between first-pass retrieval and full reranking. The talk emphasizes practical trade-offs in latency, memory, and relevance, and outlines how late interaction models could complement existing lexical, neural sparse, and dense vector approaches in production OpenSearch deployments.
Speakers
avatar for Francisco Losada de la Rosa

Francisco Losada de la Rosa

WW OpenSearch Specialist SA, AWS
Francisco Losada is a Search Specialist Solutions Architect based out of Madrid, Spain. He works with customers across EMEA to architect, implement, and evolve analytics solutions at AWS. He advocates for OpenSearch, the open-source search and analytics suite, and supports the community... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:00 - 12:20 CEST
Bohemia 3

12:00 CEST

Building an Inclusive, Diverse Community From the Ground Up - Kassian Wren, NetApp Instaclustr
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:00 - 12:20 CEST
In this session, I'll cover the basics of building a diverse and inclusive community, either around new projects or creating safe spaces for projects that don't have one.

Inclusivity and equity and the keys to diversity, and science has shown time and again that diverse teams create better solutions. It's imperative especially now that we build community both in and out of software.

This talk will cover why community is important, how to jumpstart a community, and how to deal with growth and conflict.
Speakers
avatar for Kassian Wren

Kassian Wren

Open Source Technology Evangelist, NetApp Instaclustr
Kassian (they/them) has been a coder for nearly two decades, and in devrel for over a decade. They bring an educational spin to DevRel and love to see that "ah-ha!" moment. They see every moment as a teaching opportunity, even if it's not very effective on their three cats.
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:00 - 12:20 CEST
Bohemia 2

12:20 CEST

Better Together Lunch Group
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:20 - 13:30 CEST
About the Better Together Lunch Group
The Better Together Lunch Group offers an opportunity for all event participants from underrepresented or marginalized communities (including race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability), along with their allies, to come together and build meaningful connections that extend beyond the event. We hope that this gathering will help foster greater representation and inclusion both at the event and in the open source community over time.

Who Can Attend?
Any event participant from an underrepresented or marginalized community (including race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability) and their ally guests.

Grab your lunch and meet us at the reserved tables!
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:20 - 13:30 CEST
Moravia 1-3

12:20 CEST

Lunch
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:20 - 13:30 CEST
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:20 - 13:30 CEST
Moravia 1-3

12:20 CEST

Search TAG Working Lunch
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:20 - 13:30 CEST
Grab your lunch and join our Search TAG. See you there! 
Thursday April 16, 2026 12:20 - 13:30 CEST
Studio G

13:30 CEST

Enabling Secure, Fine-Grained Resource Sharing for Team Collaboration in OpenSearch - Darshit Chanpura & Craig Perkins, Amazon
Thursday April 16, 2026 13:30 - 14:10 CEST
Before OpenSearch 3.1, plugins hand-rolled document-level access control, duplicating effort and creating inconsistent security behavior and user experiences. Even basic collaboration required security administrators to act as intermediaries.

To address this, OpenSearch introduced the Resource Sharing Framework, enabling secure, fine-grained, owner-driven sharing of plugin resources while complementing role-based access control. Since its introduction, the framework has evolved through OpenSearch 3.4 with more plugins onboarded, refined permission scopes, improved APIs, and operational hardening.

This session explains how the framework extends the Security plugin to protect high-level resources, allow owners (or full-access users) to grant and revoke per-user or per-role access at action-group granularity, and perform permission checks using standardized Java and REST APIs. You’ll see how the Anomaly Detection plugin adopts the framework to enable Google-Docs-style sharing without admin overhead. Attendees will leave with a practical migration blueprint for retiring bespoke access-control schemes and delivering a consistent, secure collaboration experience across plugins.
Speakers
avatar for Craig Perkins

Craig Perkins

Senior Software Engineer, Amazon
Craig has been engaged with the OpenSearch community since June 2022 and focuses on the Security of the platform. Craig has an extensive software engineering background of 10 years that includes managing the search infrastructure for e-commerce websites and healthcare institutions... Read More →
avatar for Darshit Chanpura

Darshit Chanpura

Software Development Engineer, Amazon
Experienced Software Developer with full-stack experience over 6 years. Currently working as Software Engineer on OpenSearch project as part of security plugin.
Thursday April 16, 2026 13:30 - 14:10 CEST
Bohemia 2

13:30 CEST

Apache Lucene Vector Search Update - Michael Sokolov, Amazon
Thursday April 16, 2026 13:30 - 14:10 CEST
Lucene Vector Search Update

There have been a lot of exciting developments in Lucene's vector search implementation recently: so many it's hard to keep track. This talk will survey all the many contributions that have come in over the last year or two, give examples of how to make use the new capabilities, and point the way for future work in this area.

Some of the specific topics may include:

* seeded search (start graph walk from a known point)
* optimistic search (safe pro-rating for efficient multi-segment search)
* Acorn-based search (more efficient application of filters)
* advances in quantization
* efficient indexing using binary partitioning over vector fields
* more efficient merging: finally, we can re-use information from graphs in existing segments and don't have to start from scratch
* proposed integrations: FAISS, CUVS, DiskANN

We'll dive more deeply into some selected topics, but the general idea is to convey the breadth of activity and the diversity of contributors.
Speakers
avatar for Michael Sokolov

Michael Sokolov

Principal Engineer, Amazon
I spent the last 25+ years developing search-based web applications, and more recently focused on the search engine specifically, becoming an Apache Lucene committer in 2019, and contributing Lucene's first approximate vector search (ANN) implementation in 2020.
Thursday April 16, 2026 13:30 - 14:10 CEST
Bohemia 3
  Search & Apache Lucene
  • Presentation Slides Attached Yes

13:30 CEST

Unconference - Part 1
Thursday April 16, 2026 13:30 - 15:30 CEST
It’s safe to say Unconference is now an OpenSearchCon tradition. Each time the community gets together for this event, we learn from one another in an engaging environment with interesting talks and open discussions.

Make plans to join us again and come ready to pitch your favorite speaking topic! This is an opportunity for the community to come together and kick off OpenSearchCon Europe with an action-packed morning of sharing and discovery. With no pre-planned talks, what you want to hear about will be determined by you and your fellow conference-goers.

Attendees/Speakers
This is a first-come, first-served event; the room holds up to 75 individuals and anyone registered for OpenSearchCon is welcome to attend until the room is full. We advise you to show up a little early to make sure you get your spot.

Each speaker has 15 minutes to do with as they see fit! Want to talk for 10 minutes and have 5 minutes of questions? Great! Have a lot to say and want to talk for the whole 15? That works too! Are you a maintainer and want to hold a lightning round of questions with the audience? Fantastic! You get the picture. Just be mindful of your 15 minutes!

Voting
- At 13:30, each attendee will receive a card and three gold-star stickers. Those who would like to give a talk will write their title and brief description on the card, put their name on the back, and post them to the board for voting.
- At 13:45, you’ll have 15 minutes to walk the board and place a gold star on one of the talks you would like to hear. One rule: please do not vote for yourself.
- At 14:00, our host, Kris Freedain, and a lucky volunteer will collect and sort the cards, then select the day’s talks from the cards receiving the most votes while ensuring the widest arrangement of topics are covered.

Presentations
At 14:15, we will return the cards to the wall in the order each talk will be given. Be ready to talk and participate! This year, we have time saved for additional presentations from 15:50-16:30 during Unconference - Part 2.

Moderators
avatar for Kris Freedain

Kris Freedain

Senior Community Manager, OpenSearch Project
Kris Freedain (he/him) is the Senior Community Manager for the OpenSearch Project, OpenSearch Software Foundation, and technical steering committee. He is also an OpenSearch Ambassador. He has decades of experience in tech, but finds connecting people to be the most fulfilling part... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 13:30 - 15:30 CEST
Bohemia 1

14:20 CEST

Vendor-Agnostic Analytics: Querying Open Columnar Formats With OpenSearch - Bharathwaj G & Arpit Bandejiya, Amazon Web Services
Thursday April 16, 2026 14:20 - 14:40 CEST
OpenSearch users increasingly need flexibility in how and where their data is stored - querying data in cloud object storage without re-ingestion, sharing datasets across analytics tools and engines, or migrating between platforms without costly ETL pipelines.

This session presents a technical deep dive into how OpenSearch can now support indexing and querying vendor-agnostic open formats natively with the new multi-engine composable architecture.

The presentation covers how the composable storage layer abstracts format-specific details while maintaining query performance. We'll explore schema management across formats, predicate pushdown to minimize data scanning, and how still existing indices like Lucene can act as layer on top of open formats as secondary indices for accelerated filtering.

Through real-world scenarios and querying production data alongside cold-tier archives in object storage, sharing datasets with other analytics engines, and leveraging specialized formats like Lance for vector workloads or Parquet / Vortex for high-compression analytics, we demonstrate how open format support delivers data portability, interoperability, and freedom from lock-in.
Speakers
avatar for Arpit Bandejiya

Arpit Bandejiya

SDE II, AWS
Arpit Bandejiya is a Software Development Engineer ll at AWS, working in Opensearch. Over the past three years, he has focused on Shard management, scalability and performance optimization. His interests lie in distributed systems and building high performance scalable infrastruc... Read More →
avatar for Bharathwaj G

Bharathwaj G

Senior SDE, Amazon
Software engineer in Amazon , OpenSearch maintainer and leads features on improving the performance of indexing and search. Interested in designing high performance distributed systems.
Thursday April 16, 2026 14:20 - 14:40 CEST
Bohemia 2
  Analytics + Security + Observability
  • Presentation Slides Attached Yes

14:20 CEST

Distributed OpenSearch Monitoring at Scale With Apache NiFi and MiNiFi Agents - Vincenzo Lombardo, Seacom
Thursday April 16, 2026 14:20 - 14:40 CEST
As OpenSearch clusters grow beyond 10–20 nodes, centralized monitoring becomes a bottleneck: single points of failure, API overload, and higher latency. Traditional approaches don’t scale.

This session presents a production-ready distributed monitoring architecture using Apache NiFi and MiNiFi. MiNiFi agents on each node collect local metrics via a custom NodeStatsProcessor (CPU, heap, JVM, I/O, thread pools), while central NiFi collectors aggregate and deduplicate cluster-wide metrics using a custom ClusterStatsProcessor and forward them to OpenSearch.

Results include linear scalability, sub-millisecond node metrics, HA, and minimal overhead. Key insights: separating local vs cluster-wide collection, deployment patterns (bare metal, VMs, containers), HA strategies with multiple NiFi collectors, and lessons from production clusters of 10–50+ nodes processing millions of metrics daily with 99.9% reliability.

Ideal for OpenSearch operators managing 10+ nodes, platform engineers building observability pipelines, and anyone hitting centralized monitoring limits. Walk away with a distributed architecture you can implement immediately.
Speakers
avatar for Vincenzo Lombardo

Vincenzo Lombardo

Team Leader Apache Nifi, Seacom
Segue le tecnologie legate all’area No Code, con un focus principale sull’ecosistema NiFi (NiFi, MiNiFi, NiFi Registry, C2 Server, NiFiKop) e sul suo utilizzo in ambito ETL e nell’integrazione con altri sistemi informativi.

Ha esperienza nel campo della ricerca (Google Search Appliance, Mindbreeze, OpenSearch, oltre a Elasticsearch e allo stack ELK) e nell’indicizzazione dei log in ambito sicurezza (Wazuh e Logstash... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 14:20 - 14:40 CEST
Bohemia 3
  Operating OpenSearch
  • Presentation Slides Attached Yes

14:50 CEST

Agentic Relevance Tuning With OpenSearch: Faster, Easier, and Higher Quality Search at Scale - Bobby Mohammed, Amazon Web Services & Daniel Wrigley, OpenSource Connections
Thursday April 16, 2026 14:50 - 15:30 CEST
Search relevance tuning is one of the hardest—and most expensive—problems in modern search systems. It demands deep expertise in Lucene scoring, complex query DSLs, and iterative manual testing. While tools like OpenSearch User Behavior Insights (UBI) and the Search Relevance Workbench provide the data and the environment for improvement, the leap from "analyzing data" to "deploying a fix" remains a significant hurdle for many search engineers.

In this session, we introduce Agentic Relevance Tuning (ART)—an end-to-end framework that uses LLM-powered agents to automate the full relevance lifecycle in OpenSearch. ART replaces time consuming manual workflows with a coordinated system of specialized agents that continuously detect relevance issues, hypothesize improvements, and orchestrate offline and online evaluation.

By combining OpenSearch’s relevance tooling with the reasoning and orchestration capabilities of agents, ART transforms relevance tuning into a faster, more accurate, and more accessible process—enabling both beginner and expert search engineers to ship better search experiences to their customers.
Speakers
avatar for Bobby Mohammed

Bobby Mohammed

Principal Product Manager, Amazon Web Services
Bobby Mohammed is a Principal Product Manager at AWS, leading product initiatives in Search, GenAI, and Agentic AI. He has previously worked across the full machine-learning lifecycle, including data, analytics, and ML features on the Amazon SageMaker platform, as well as deep-learning... Read More →
avatar for Daniel Wrigley

Daniel Wrigley

Search Consultant, OpenSource Connections
Daniel has worked in search since graduating in computational linguistics studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2012 where he developed his weakness for search and natural language processing. His experience as a search consultant paved the way for becoming an O’Reilly... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 14:50 - 15:30 CEST
Bohemia 3

14:50 CEST

Integrating Docling With OpenSearch for Advanced RAG and Agentic Applications - Cesar Berrospi Ramis, IBM Research
Thursday April 16, 2026 14:50 - 15:30 CEST
This talk introduces Docling, an open-source document processing framework, and its integration with OpenSearch for production-ready AI applications. Docling converts complex documents such as PDFs, DOCX, and PPTX into structured, AI-ready formats while preserving layout, tables, images, and metadata for high-quality Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Docling is supported by the LF AI & Data Foundation.
The session presents practical integration patterns for advanced search applications. We showcase a multimodal RAG architecture built with Docling and OpenSearch. By combining Docling’s document conversion with OpenSearch’s vector and metadata search, we enable visually grounded RAG systems where users can verify AI-generated answers in the source documents. Documents can be indexed by running Docling externally or by invoking Docling within an OpenSearch ingest pipeline using the Docling Java API. We also demonstrate an agentic application using OpenSearch agentic search and Docling MCP for document understanding and information extraction.
Attendees will learn how these integrations simplify document ingestion and enable accurate and explainable AI applications.
Speakers
avatar for Cesar Berrospi Ramis

Cesar Berrospi Ramis

Senior Research Scientist, IBM Research
Cesar Berrospi Ramis is a Senior Research Scientist at IBM Research, Zurich. With a background in mathematics and engineering, he specializes in AI applications in document understanding and is part of Docling's development team.
Thursday April 16, 2026 14:50 - 15:30 CEST
Bohemia 2
  Search & Apache Lucene
  • Presentation Slides Attached Yes

15:30 CEST

Break
Thursday April 16, 2026 15:30 - 15:50 CEST
Thursday April 16, 2026 15:30 - 15:50 CEST
Main Foyer

15:50 CEST

Accelerating Aggregations with Lucene-Aware Execution in OpenSearch - Ankit Jain, Amazon Web Services
Thursday April 16, 2026 15:50 - 16:30 CEST
Aggregation performance in OpenSearch is often limited by JVM execution overhead rather than aggregation logic itself. Most queries process documents at a time (DAAT) through Lucene collectors and rely on deep virtual call chains, which restrict JIT optimizations and waste CPU resources at scale.

This talk explores how Lucene-aware, bulk-oriented execution can significantly speed up aggregation processing. We will show how batching document processing, simplifying collector and doc values access patterns, and reducing virtual method dispatch lead to more JVM-friendly execution paths. We will also touch on how Lucene skip indexes built on sorted doc values can be used to skip or bulk-process ranges of documents during aggregation, reducing unnecessary work when data can be summarized at a higher level.

Using real OpenSearch aggregation pipelines as examples, the session presents early performance results and discusses practical trade-offs when moving from fine-grained per-document logic to bulk processing. The talk is aimed at engineers working on search engines, Lucene-based systems, or JVM performance.
Speakers
avatar for Ankit Jain

Ankit Jain

Lucene Committer | OpenSearch Maintainer | AWS OpenSearch, Amazon
Ankit Jain is a Software Engineer on the Amazon OpenSearch Service team, leading performance and scalability initiatives for search infrastructure. He is an active maintainer and committer for the Apache Lucene and OpenSearch projects, with hands-on experience operating large-scale... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 15:50 - 16:30 CEST
Bohemia 2

15:50 CEST

Vectors Vs. Hallucinations: OpenSearch's GenAI Survival Kit - Neel Shah, StackGen & Laysa Uchoa, Independent
Thursday April 16, 2026 15:50 - 16:30 CEST
GenAI hallucinations plague production apps, but OpenSearch's vector search and hybrid retrieval turn unreliable LLMs into precision engines. This talk unveils battle-tested RAG pipelines that slash errors by 80%+, drawing from semantic search and real-time analytics use cases.

Discover hands-on strategies:
- Ingesting embeddings at scale with neural ranking and k-NN plugins for sub-second queries.
- Hybrid BM25 + vector fusion to ground responses in enterprise knowledge bases and logs.
- Live demos: RAG over petabyte traces, chunking optimizations, and eval frameworks benchmarking recall.

Packed with code snippets, failure autopsies, and deployment blueprints for Kubernetes. Ideal for ML engineers and architects building trustworthy GenAI, escape the hallucination trap and deploy survival-ready search today!
Speakers
avatar for Neel Shah

Neel Shah

Developer Advocate, StackGen
A DevOps engineer with a great passion for building communities around DevOps. Organiser of Google Cloud Gandhinagar, CNCF Gandhinagar, Hashicorp User Group Gandhinagar and Open Source Weekend. Have mentored 15+ hackathons and open source programs. I have given more than 15 talks... Read More →
avatar for Laysa Uchoa

Laysa Uchoa

Platform Engineer, Independent
I'm a Python developer and Pyladies Munich organizer. Love to learn new things and to share with others. I believe that technology can make the world more democratic and just better - let's contribute to this.
Thursday April 16, 2026 15:50 - 16:30 CEST
Bohemia 3

15:50 CEST

Unconference - Part 2
Thursday April 16, 2026 15:50 - 16:30 CEST
It’s safe to say Unconference is now an OpenSearchCon tradition. Each time the community gets together for this event, we learn from one another in an engaging environment with interesting talks and open discussions.

Make plans to join us again and come ready to pitch your favorite speaking topic! This is an opportunity for the community to come together and kick off OpenSearchCon Europe with an action-packed afternoon of sharing and discovery. With no pre-planned talks, what you want to hear about will be determined by you and your fellow conference-goers.

Attendees/Speakers
This is a first-come, first-served event; the room holds up to 75 individuals and anyone registered for OpenSearchCon is welcome to attend until the room is full. We advise you to show up a little early to make sure you get your spot.

Each speaker has 15 minutes to do with as they see fit! Want to talk for 10 minutes and have 5 minutes of questions? Great! Have a lot to say and want to talk for the whole 15? That works too! Are you a maintainer and want to hold a lightning round of questions with the audience? Fantastic! You get the picture. Just be mindful of your 15 minutes!

Please note: This block of time will be reserved for additional presentations and discussion time. The unconference session begins at 13:30.

Moderators
avatar for Kris Freedain

Kris Freedain

Senior Community Manager, OpenSearch Project
Kris Freedain (he/him) is the Senior Community Manager for the OpenSearch Project, OpenSearch Software Foundation, and technical steering committee. He is also an OpenSearch Ambassador. He has decades of experience in tech, but finds connecting people to be the most fulfilling part... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 15:50 - 16:30 CEST
Bohemia 1

16:40 CEST

Alert Fatigue to Action: Observability as the Backbone of Practical AIOps with OpenSearch - Stefano Pampaloni, Seacom srl
Thursday April 16, 2026 16:40 - 17:00 CEST
Alert fatigue is rarely caused by missing data. Logs, metrics, traces, and alerts are usually available, but during incidents they remain fragmented. Engineers still correlate signals manually, under pressure, relying on experience rather than shared context.

This talk describes an AIOps approach where observability data becomes the basis for operational decisions. OpenSearch is used as the central platform to collect, query, and correlate logs, metrics, and traces, providing a consistent data model and query layer across systems. By leveraging MCP capabilities, agentic AI, and tools, automation plays a central role in closing the loop from GitOps to delivery, monitoring, and problem resolution.

From this foundation, OpenSearch can be integrated with complementary tools to extend its capabilities. KeepHQ can consume data from OpenSearch to design alerting and response workflows and connect ticketing systems and external tools. HolmesGPT can operate on data retrieved from OpenSearch to assist with incident analysis and root cause investigation.

The focus is on what happens after detection: reducing noise, correlating signals, and supporting engineers during incident response.
Speakers
avatar for Stefano Pampaloni

Stefano Pampaloni

CEO, Seacom srl
Stefano is the CEO of two open source companies operating as benefit companies, combining business activity with social and environmental impact. He founded his first Internet Service Provider in 1995, building the entire infrastructure using open source software, and later created... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 16:40 - 17:00 CEST
Bohemia 1
  Analytics + Security + Observability
  • Presentation Slides Attached Yes

16:40 CEST

Operating OpenSearch at Scale With Kubernetes Operators: Lessons Learned and Community Insights - Christian Dinse, SAP SE & Prudhvi Godithi, AWS OpenSearch
Thursday April 16, 2026 16:40 - 17:20 CEST
Running OpenSearch in Kubernetes sounds simple — until you try to do it at scale, with high availability, zero downtime, and evolving workloads. In this talk, we draw on years of production experience operating OpenSearch clusters for SAP Cloud Logging service. We aim to share the key lessons learned and design patterns from building our Kubernetes operator.

We’ll dive into how we approached seamless upgrades, built tailored monitoring, and improved performance when interacting with OpenSearch APIs. Even if we adapt solutions to fit internal needs, the lessons learned are valuable for the broader OpenSearch and Kubernetes community.

In the second half, we turn our focus to the open-source OpenSearch Kubernetes Operator. We’ll explore its current state, the challenges the community is addressing and efforts to improve its reliability. We’ll also discuss how this open-source offering enables organizations to seamlessly scale and manage OpenSearch clusters on Kubernetes, and highlight opportunities for collaboration within the project.
Speakers
avatar for Christian Dinse

Christian Dinse

Senior Software Developer, SAP SE
Christian Dinse is a Senior Software Developer at SAP, building Kubernetes operators for OpenSearch and related components for SAP’s Cloud Logging service. He is also co-author and maintainer of two open-source Node.js packages that simplify sending structured logs and OpenTelemetry... Read More →
avatar for Prudhvi Godithi

Prudhvi Godithi

Software Development Engineer, AWS OpenSearch
As a maintainer of the OpenSearch Project, my primary focus is on search performance optimization and fostering open-source growth. I maintain several key components, including the Kubernetes Operator, Terraform Provider, Helm Charts, and the community-driven OpenSearch Metrics Project... Read More →
Thursday April 16, 2026 16:40 - 17:20 CEST
Bohemia 3
  Operating OpenSearch
  • Presentation Slides Attached Yes

16:40 CEST

Getting Started With OpenSearch Development - Andrew Ross & Saurabh Singh, AWS
Thursday April 16, 2026 16:40 - 17:20 CEST
Are you interested in contributing to OpenSearch but unsure where to begin? This 30-minute presentation provides a practical roadmap for developers looking to make their first contribution to the OpenSearch GitHub project.

We'll start by exploring the OpenSearch repository structure and architecture, helping you understand how the codebase is organized across its core components. You'll learn how to set up your local development environment, including the essential tools, dependencies, and configurations needed to build and test OpenSearch successfully.

We'll also go into what expectations you should have from maintainers who review your code, as well as best practices for working with the community.
Speakers
avatar for Andrew Ross

Andrew Ross

Principal Engineer, AWS
OpenSearch maintainer and Principal Engineer at AWS
avatar for Saurabh Singh

Saurabh Singh

Software Development Manager, AWS OpenSearch

Thursday April 16, 2026 16:40 - 17:20 CEST
Bohemia 2

17:20 CEST

Search Party
Thursday April 16, 2026 17:20 - 19:20 CEST
Join us for an evening of networking at the OpenSearch Party! Connect with industry friends while visiting sponsors and indulging in tasty treats. It’s the perfect setting to reconnect with colleagues and make new acquaintances in a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere.
Thursday April 16, 2026 17:20 - 19:20 CEST
Main Foyer
 
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