Tens of billions of open source company Elastic changed coaches, and the former CEO publicly shelled Amazon

Author | Xin Xiaoliang

On Wednesday, Elastic announced the promotion of Ashutosh Kulkarni (Ash) as CEO, replacing former CEO Shay Banon. Ash is the company's Chief Product Officer and architect behind Elastic's cloud business, observability, security, and enterprise search solutions, and Ash has played a huge role in driving elastic cloud business growth and building stronger relationships with customers, which is the main reason why Ash is the new CEO.

Founders return to the CTO position

Banon, as former CEO and founder, will resume his role as Chief Technology Officer and continue to serve on the Board. "I'm incredibly excited about Ash becoming CEO, I've seen him in action over the past year, and I know that his focused and empathetic leadership style and superior execution and operational skills will enable him to successfully lead Elastic," Banon says. Elastic is my life's work, back in the CTO role, I will focus on innovation and products, people and culture, Ash will lead Elastic to its full potential. ”

Ash himself said: "It is an honor to follow in Banon's footsteps and lead Elastic to the next chapter of growth. As the markets in which we operate continue to grow and the volume and complexity of data explodes, we face tremendous opportunities. From observability and security to enterprise search, Elastic is leveraging the power of search to help thousands of customers extract value from their data in a more intuitive way than ever before, and Elastic Cloud is achieving this with unprecedented scale, speed, and relevance. ”

Originally, Shay Banon created Compass in 2004, slowly iterated into Elasticsearch and released the first version of Elasticsearch in February 2010. In 2012, Banon co-founded Elasticsearch BV (renamed Elastic in 15 years), which provides commercial services and products around Elasticsearch and related software. Elastic raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors such as Index Ventures and Benchmark, and then Went public in 2018 with a valuation of $4.9 billion.

The war with the Amazon

Banon and Amazon's feud stemmed from an incident in 2015 when Amazon's cloud division launched a product called Amazon Elasticsearch Services based on Elasticsearch's code to compete with Elasticsearch and gain more customers in the competition.

Banon publicly bombarded Amazon, accusing them of abusing the Elastic brand name, stealing its technology, and "disguising it with false altruism." After unsuccessfully suing Amazon for trademark infringement, Elastic changed its strategy, moving Elasticsearch and Kibana to a more restrictive license in January 2021, organizing Amazon to adopt its code. In response to the changes in Elastic, Amazon released the Elasticsearch and Kibana branches licensed in Apache 2.0, and Amazon explained that in order to provide customers with trusted software, they wanted to develop their own version of Elasticsearch, and the conflict between the two sides had reached its peak.

In September 2021, Amazon renamed its product Amazon OpenSearch Service, but Banon's condemnation of Amazon showed no signs of subsiding. Elastic's new CEO is more focused on products and cloud services, and the opposition to the cloud computing giant is expected to improve.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service officially changed its name, there must be a battle between cloud vendors and the open source community?

（https://www.infoq.cn/article/dhohalci19rmw7iojc7d）

Frequent data leaks

At the end of 2019, Elasticsearch suffered a massive data breach, with about 2.7 billion email addresses, 1 billion email account passwords, and nearly 800,000 birth certificates being compromised.

In fact, This is not the first time that Elasticsearch has had a database leak, after which Elasticsearch was exposed to five data leaks a month, and in August 2021, Elasticsearch had nearly 2 million more list leaks. According to the analysis, this is related to the fact that the Elasticsearch server is not password protected.

If you're using the open source version, it's a good idea to make some enhancements to prevent data leakage, the easiest way to do that is to enable authentication and enable TLS.

Reference Links:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220112005959/en/