Talk:Wikimedia Search Platform/Decision Records/Search backend replacement technology

Migration difficulties for third party MediaWiki installations

It's anticipated that a migration from Elasticsearch 7 to Elasticsearch 8 would similarly entail nontrivial effort, and the same would be expected for an Elasticsearch 7 to OpenSearch migration. This is just part of the effort required to keep systems up-to-date.

I think this overly downplays the added complexity for some third-party users. I don't think it changes the outcome of our decision, but changing software can certainly be more complex than upgrading, and changing vendors, even for open source, can result in added bureaucratic overhead at some organizations.

I think the "Negative Consequences" section should include something about potential additional upgrade burden for third-party users.

Also, in point #3 (Continued attention to Elasticsearch 7-based support until the the MediaWiki official release following the first introduction of OpenSearch technology.), I'm concerned that supporting both OpenSearch and Elasticsearch at the same time will be significantly more difficult than replacing one with the other.

TJones (WMF) (talk) 20:13, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! I attempted to address these in https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Draft%3AABaso_%28WMF%29%2FWikimedia_Search_Platform%2FDecision_Records%2FSearch_backend_replacement_technology&diff=6664884&oldid=6664765 . ABaso (WMF) (talk) 21:50, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Bwah, it seems the newlines got removed upon publish. Let me see if I can get those back. ABaso (WMF) (talk) 21:51, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Transparency, software freedom and upstream

Thanks a lot for recording the decision and context so clearly! This is very helpful. I note there's no mention of which upstream is going to be used: I assume this means no specific decision has been made yet.

This is important work for the preservation of the right to fork and software freedom more broadly. WMF is doing the expected and obvious thing here, but still it's a positive example. It will be helpful to share learnings along the way and I hope the team remains able to do it as well as we've grown accustomed to.

Personally I'd like to see all of this packaged in Debian, so that we can spread the benefits to users of the MediaWiki Debian packages and everyone else, as well as reuse the skills of experienced Debian packagers (WMF has successfully outsourced some work to Debian consultants in the past. But that's a relatively minor point. Nemo 09:40, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

Elasticsearch is now open source again

About three weeks after this decision was made, it was announced that Elasticsearch will become open source again, by adding AGPL as a license option "in the coming weeks", as announced in this blog post. I don't know if the timing is coincidental, but regardless, it seems to me that this removes the major reason for the switch to OpenSearch. Does this news change the thinking at all? Yaron Koren (talk) 15:10, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

@Yaron Koren task T370661 has been reopened, so I imagine there will be some comment of this there. KHarlan (WMF) (talk) 15:21, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Ah, thanks for letting me know. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:30, 2 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks @Yaron Koren and @KHarlan (WMF) - that's right, Search Platform plans to think on this more given last week's blog post. ABaso (WMF) (talk) 15:13, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

This has been further reviewed and the team plans to stick with its decision to migrate to OpenSearch. I've updated the decision record verbiage. ABaso (WMF) (talk) 10:31, 11 October 2024 (UTC)