Why Elastic Is Switching to AGPL: Licensing Battles with AWS and OpenSearch

Shay Banon, founder and CTO of Elastic, announced that after three and a half years of using the Apache 2.0 license, a new AGPL (GNU Affero General Public License) will be added to Elasticsearch and Kibana.

Banon said that in the coming weeks they will introduce AGPL as another licensing option alongside ELv2 (Elastic v2) and SSPL (Server Side Public License).

ELv2 forbids offering the product as a hosted service, while the SSPL—created by MongoDB Inc.—is a source‑available license that requires publishing the code of the service‑management system.

As Banon explained in January 2021, the goal is to prevent companies from providing Elasticsearch and Kibana as cloud services without cooperating with Elastic, a move specifically aimed at AWS. Unlike the Apache license, AGPL is OSI‑approved, designed for server software, and requires that any modifications be released under the same license.

Elasticsearch is a search and analytics database engine, and Kibana is a dashboard that interacts with Elasticsearch to provide data visualisation.

In April 2021, AWS launched OpenSearch under the Apache 2.0 license, effectively forking Elasticsearch and Kibana version 7.10.2.

Banon stated that AWS’s license change is effective, that Amazon has fully invested in their fork, that market confusion has been resolved, and that the partnership with AWS is now stronger than ever.

He emphasized that the new licensing decision is not a correction of a 2021 mistake nor a sign of Elastic’s poor market performance.

"The situation is completely different now," Banon added.

The key issue is how the landscape has shifted: while AWS OpenSearch is gaining momentum, Elasticsearch remains the more recognized brand, so the 2021 license change both created a competitor and eliminated the "market confusion" Banon described. Dropping the Apache 2.0 license also left many Elasticsearch contributors feeling uneasy about the re‑licensing.

AWS former vice‑president Adrian Cockcroft commented on Hacker News that the core of the 2021 dispute was AWS’s desire to contribute security features to the open‑source project, whereas Elastic wanted to keep security as an enterprise‑only feature, rejecting AWS’s proposals. He added that Elastic mixed licenses in the codebase deliberately to make it harder for AWS to use.

Banon later acknowledged that Elastic’s stock has fluctuated since 2021, noting that subscription customers grew from 15,000 in April 2021 to 21,200, and that Elastic Cloud revenue is now up 30% year‑over‑year. Elastic Cloud is managed by Elastic and hosted on AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure, giving substance to Banon’s remarks about a stronger AWS partnership.