Blog

Everything we've shipped.

Platform releases and product announcements, newest first.

OpenSearch

ClusterNest vs Amazon OpenSearch Service

We ran OpenSearch Benchmark against a three-node ClusterNest Standard cluster and the matching Amazon OpenSearch Service configuration, from a test machine inside AWS's own region. We measured bulk indexing, queries and both together, from a single client up to 64 in parallel, and priced each cluster at its list price.

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OpenSearch

OpenSearch v3.9 now available

OpenSearch 3.9 is live on ClusterNest, with a native neural sparse search engine, leaner vector storage, and new observability tools in Dashboards.

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OpenSearch

Passwordless OpenSearch logging

Most Kubernetes log pipelines run on a password: one credential for the log store, copied to every node, shared across clusters and almost never rotated. Kubernetes already gives every pod a signed identity that expires in minutes, and OpenSearch already knows how to check one. We joined the two and ended up with a logging pipeline that has no password anywhere in it, works across a fleet of clusters, and lets each cluster write only its own logs.

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OpenSearch

Multiple SSO providers

Managed OpenSearch now trusts several identity providers at once. Employees, contractors, the company you just acquired and your CI pipelines all sign in through the system that already governs them, and the secrets behind it never leave the vault. SSO is still free on every tier.

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Prometheus

Managed Prometheus is GA

Managed Prometheus is out of beta, and it's a different service from the one that went in. Every cluster is distributed and highly available, alerting is built in, remote write 2.0 cut the egress of two of our own clusters by about two thirds, and your workloads can push metrics without a single static credential.

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Platform

MCP connector for AI agents

ClusterNest now runs an MCP connector, so a coding agent can create clusters, rotate credentials, manage organizations and read invoices directly. Paste one URL into your client, log in through the browser, and it works inside your own account.

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Platform

New site, blog has moved

clusternest.com has been rebuilt, and the blog now runs on it rather than on the documentation site. Every post kept its slug, and the old addresses redirect: posts, tag pages and both feeds.

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OpenSearch

OpenSearch v3.8 now available

OpenSearch 3.8 is live on ClusterNest, with faster vector search, a broader set of AI agent integrations, and new tools for exploring logs without leaving Dashboards.

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Platform

Programmatic access & Terraform organizations

We've shipped two updates that make it easier to automate ClusterNest end-to-end: a simpler way to authenticate against the API programmatically, and a Terraform provider release that's faster on long applies and can now manage organizations directly.

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OpenSearch

Log shipper defaults that lose logs

We sent 494,175 numbered log lines through Fluent Bit and Vector into OpenSearch and counted every one that arrived. With stock settings, one shipper lost 62 percent of a busy pod's logs and the other lost 85 percent, both without logging a single error. Five defaults were behind it, and each one is a one-line fix.

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OpenSearch

OpenSearch v3.6 now available

Big milestone: OpenSearch 3.6 is live on ClusterNest, and it's the project's first Long-Term Support release, with 18+ months of guaranteed support, so it's a solid pick for clusters you don't want to babysit through every minor upgrade.

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OpenSearch

Log storage in OpenSearch

We shipped exactly 100 MB of logs into OpenSearch, once with Fluent Bit and once with Vector, and measured every byte that landed on disk. One copy came to about 1.5 times the raw size, the replica doubled that, and the search index, not the logs, turned out to be the biggest part of the bill.

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OpenSearch

OpenSearch 3.3 & 3.4 now available

OpenSearch 3.3 and 3.4 are selectable on ClusterNest clusters. In the same change, OpenSearch 2.x is deprecated here: still running, no longer offered on new clusters.

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Prometheus

Managed Prometheus in beta

Metrics on the same terms as logs. Managed Prometheus is open in beta: a remote write endpoint and PromQL over a cluster you size by tier and node count, priced the same way as our OpenSearch service.

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OpenSearch

OpenSearch v3.2 now available

OpenSearch 3.2 can be selected on new and existing clusters. The console handles it, and Terraform provider 1.1.2 adds it to the version list.

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Platform

The console has been rebuilt

The ClusterNest Console has been rebuilt from the ground up. Dark mode throughout, one visual language from the landing page to the cluster list, and the settings that used to be Terraform-only are now in the interface.

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OpenSearch

S3 snapshot repositories

OpenSearch clusters can now snapshot to an S3 bucket you control, on AWS or any S3-compatible store. Authentication is an IAM role or static keys, and the copy is yours whatever happens to your account with us.

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OpenSearch

OpenSearch version 3 now available

OpenSearch 3.0 and 3.1 can now be selected on ClusterNest clusters. It is the first major release since 2.0, rebased on Lucene 10 and requiring Java 21, so it is a version worth reading the notes for before you move.

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OpenSearch

Advanced tier is GA

Advanced tier OpenSearch clusters are open to everyone. Eight vCPU, 64 GiB and 2 TB of NVMe per node, launched from the console with no quota request and no waiting for an approval.

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OpenSearch

SSO with SAML and OIDC

OpenSearch clusters can now delegate authentication to your identity provider over SAML or OIDC, so access follows the directory you already run. It costs nothing extra, on every tier.

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OpenSearch

Terraform provider is GA

Clusters can now be declared in Terraform rather than clicked into existence. The ClusterNest provider is out of preview: create, update and destroy OpenSearch clusters from the same repository as the rest of your infrastructure.

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Platform

API v2 is out

v2 of the ClusterNest API publishes a full OpenAPI schema, so you can generate a client rather than write one. It also brings its own authentication: two-factor, passkeys and app passwords. The console already runs on it.

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Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch service retired

Two years after launching managed OpenSearch, we are closing the Elasticsearch service to new clusters. Existing customers keep running, and we will come to you about the migration rather than the other way round.

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OpenSearch

ELK is dead, long live ...?

In 2013 you set up centralised logging by installing Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana, and the reason that was a good decision is that it was not really a decision. Ten years on, every letter has multiple credible answers, the licence under the first one has moved, and the integration work is yours. Here is what happened, what it costs, and the four questions I now use to pick a stack.

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OpenSearch

Managed OpenSearch is live

The service we said we were building in July is open. Managed OpenSearch clusters, priced by tier and node count like our Elasticsearch service, with OpenSearch Dashboards included and a migration we run with you.

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Elasticsearch

Managed OpenSearch is coming

OpenSearch has reached a stable release. We said in January that the answer to the Elasticsearch relicensing was an engine that is genuinely open with more than one vendor behind it, and this is the one. A managed service is in build.

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Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is no longer open source

Elastic has moved Elasticsearch and Kibana off Apache 2.0 and onto the SSPL and its own licence. The source is still readable. It is no longer open source, and that changes what any managed service can honestly promise.

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Elasticsearch

ClusterNest launches managed Elasticsearch

ClusterNest is open. Managed Elasticsearch clusters, sized by tier and node count, with provisioning, upgrades, backups and monitoring on us. You pick two numbers and those two numbers are the bill.

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