OpenSearchCon Europe 2026

OpenSearch 3 was the first version released under the OpenSearch and Linux Foundations aegis and represented the evolution of the technology into a true open source project.  

Now we have a new challenge, delivering the best search solution in a market place that is rapidly changing. In this talk I will share the recently published roadmap for OpenSearch for 2026 and go into how this roadmap will support bringing a brand new community into the OpenSearch fold, that of data scientists and AI engineers.

This new community is characterized by "wants to use search but that doesn’t want to spend a lot of time on search". They think that hybrid search with complex rerankers like cross encoders is the first place to start, not the last place, and we need to make them feel welcome!

You will learn about how we're "compressing complexity" in OpenSearch so that the extremely powerful capabilities of the engine are easily accessible to any developer.  Leaving this talk you'll understand the direction, and most importantly, how you can get involved in driving this evolution of OpenSearch.