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Amazon recently announced the general availability of OpenSearch Serverless, a new serverless option for Amazon OpenSearch service, which automatically provisions and scales the underlying resources for faster data ingestion and query responses.

Amazon OpenSearch is an open-source, distributed search and analytics suite derived from Elasticsearch. It supports the latest versions of OpenSearch, previous versions of Elasticsearch, and OpenSearch Dashboards and Kibana.

The key with OpenSearch Serverless is that it decouples storage and compute components, allowing every layer to scale independently based on workload demands. In addition, it also decouples the indexing (ingest) components from the search (query) components, with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) as the primary data storage for indexes.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/amazon-opensearch-serverless-is-now-generally-available/

The GA release of the serverless option is a quick follow-up from the preview launch at re:Invent 2022 last December, and includes a few enhancements with scale-in support and availability in three additional regions. 

Regarding scaling, OpenSearch will now scale out and scale in to the minimum resources required to support the customers’ workloads. In addition, the compute capacity used for data ingestion, search and the query is measured in OpenSearch Compute Units (OCUs). The OCU limit per account has now been increased from 20 to 50 for both indexing and query. And finally, customers can now use the high-level OpenSearch clients to ingest and query your data and migrate data from their OpenSearch clusters using Logstash.

Khawaja Shams, a co-founder & CEO of momento, tweeted:

#OpenSearch “#Serverless” is now GA – but it isn’t Serverless. 
“One OCU comprises 6 GB of RAM, corresponding vCPU, 120 GB of GP3 storage (used to provide fast access to the most frequently accessed data).”
An OCU is code for $8.4K/yr if you are idle! 2x if you have a dev env

In addition, Carl Meadows, product manager for Amazon OpenSearch Service and the OpenSearch project, responded to a question via a Twitter thread if the service is serverless:

Hi Ben – As of today, there is a min. compute required per account to ensure fast and hot query and indexing performance – though scale to zero and pause/resume are top requests in our list -thanks.

Currently, OpenSearch Serverless is available in eight AWS Regions globally: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (Ireland). Pricing details of the OpenSearch Serverless are available on the pricing page under serverless.