[ANNOUNCE] Plans to drop ElasticSearch support in Gerrit because of SSPL licensing

[Luca Milanesio]

Hi all,
Following the discussion and decisions taken during the last ESC in March [1], I am announcing that the Gerrit project will stop supporting ElasticSearch as an indexing backend in the near future.

Why are we doing this? The decision is a direct consequence of Elastic changing its licensing policies from v7.11 onwards. That means that the latest date of when Gerrit could keep ElasticSearch in its code-base is the 11th of May 2022. After that date, the latest ElasticSearch v7.10 version Apache 2.0 will be officially EOL [3]: we will be left with no choice other than to drop the support altogether.

Should you be worried about the change? Yes, if you are currently using ElasticSearch as the primary backend for Gerrit indexes.

What are the alternatives? There are possibly two options available:

Option-1: Move to Lucene and recreate all indexes. It is likely to be an expensive and long operation. However, you can set up a second Gerrit server with a Lucene indexing backend and propagate the changes reindexing using the HA plugin (see [2]) for keeping them up-to-date with the main site. The two Gerrit servers could be co-located on the same host so that you do not have to configure any externally shared filesystem.

Option-2: If you need ElasticSearch for your company and are willing to accept the SSPL license, including the potential costs associated, you could speak up and propose to this audience the indexing engine's externalization as a libModule [4].

Option-1 is available today, and you can start planning the migration with plenty of time in advance. Option-2 is subject to the availability of people to drive the initiative and allocate time for the development of an ElasticSearch libModule for Gerrit and the associated changes in core to allow the pluggability of the indexing engine.
We cannot foresee IF and WHEN it may be available as an option, and it is all subject to the availability of people and time for implementing it.

Please speak up and give your feedback on the above plans, bringing your use-case and other possible options we may not have considered so far.

Thanks for your feedback.
Luca Milanesio, on behalf of the Gerrit Engineering Steering Committee.

[1] https://www.gerritcodereview.com/2021-03-09-esc-minutes.html#elasticsearch-moved-to-sspl
[2] https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/high-availability/
[3] https://www.elastic.co/support/eol
[4] https://gerrit-documentation.storage.googleapis.com/Documentation/3.3.3/config-gerrit.html#gerrit.installModule

[Martin Fick]

On Monday, April 5, 2021 4:00:35 PM MDT Luca Milanesio wrote:
> Hi all,
> Following the discussion and decisions taken during the last ESC in March
> [1], I am announcing that the Gerrit project will stop supporting
> ElasticSearch as an indexing backend in the near future.
>

> Option-1: Move to Lucene ...

> Option-2: If you need ElasticSearch for your company and are willing to
> accept the SSPL license, including the potential costs associated, you
> could speak up and propose to this audience the indexing engine's
> externalization as a libModule [4].

It would be nice to also consider:

Option-3: Use the new amazon version instead.

-Martin

--
The Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. is a member of Code
Aurora Forum, hosted by The Linux Foundation

[Matthias Sohn]

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 10:22 PM Martin Fick <mf...@codeaurora.org> wrote:

On Monday, April 5, 2021 4:00:35 PM MDT Luca Milanesio wrote:
> Hi all,
> Following the discussion and decisions taken during the last ESC in March
> [1], I am announcing that the Gerrit project will stop supporting
> ElasticSearch as an indexing backend in the near future.
>
> Option-1: Move to Lucene ...

> Option-2: If you need ElasticSearch for your company and are willing to
> accept the SSPL license, including the potential costs associated, you
> could speak up and propose to this audience the indexing engine's
> externalization as a libModule [4].

It would be nice to also consider:

Option-3: Use the new amazon version instead.

+1 for considering this option

their website is here https://opendistro.github.io/for-elasticsearch/

and here is the announcement of the fork: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-truly-open-source-elasticsearch

-Matthias