OpenSearch

Managed OpenSearch for full-text search and analytics, with single-node or multi-node high-availability clusters and automated backups.

Creating an OpenSearch instance

From the dashboard, click New service, then Database, then OpenSearch. Pick a storage size and a plan, and StackBlaze provisions the cluster for you.

Connect OpenSearch to your service from the Environment tab. StackBlaze injects OPENSEARCH_URL automatically, so your application can read the endpoint and credentials from the environment.

Connecting

OpenSearch exposes an HTTP REST API over TLS on port 9200. The injected OPENSEARCH_URL points at the internal cluster endpoint and includes the credentials, so you rarely need to assemble it by hand.

Internal endpoint (OPENSEARCH_URL)

https://user:password@[service-name].internal:9200

Because the endpoint is internal, it is reachable from services in the same project over private networking. Most OpenSearch and Elasticsearch client libraries accept this URL directly.

Standard vs high availability

You choose the topology when creating the instance. Standard runs a single node and is a good fit for development and smaller workloads. High availability runs a multi-node cluster where each index has primary and replica shards spread across nodes, so the loss of a single node does not lose data or take the cluster offline.

	Standard	High availability
Nodes	Single node	Multiple nodes
Shard layout	Primary shards only	Primary and replica shards across nodes
Node loss	Cluster unavailable	Stays available, no data loss
Best for	Development and testing	Production workloads

Indexing and searching

OpenSearch speaks a JSON over HTTP API. The example below creates an index, indexes a single document, and runs a match query against OPENSEARCH_URL.

index-and-search.sh

# Create an index
curl -X PUT "$OPENSEARCH_URL/articles"

# Index a document
curl -X POST "$OPENSEARCH_URL/articles/_doc" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{ "title": "Hello OpenSearch", "body": "Full-text search made simple." }'

# Search the index
curl -X GET "$OPENSEARCH_URL/articles/_search" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{ "query": { "match": { "title": "OpenSearch" } } }'

Tip

Refreshing is near real time. If a freshly indexed document does not appear in search results immediately, allow a moment for the refresh interval, or use the refresh query parameter when indexing test data.

Backups

Every OpenSearch instance is protected by automated, encrypted backups that follow the platform backup policy. OpenSearch also supports snapshot repositories, so you can take and restore index snapshots through its native snapshot API when you need application-level control. See /docs/databases/backups for details on how backups are scheduled, encrypted, and restored.

Under the hood

OpenSearch is the open-source search and analytics engine forked from Elasticsearch. StackBlaze runs it through a Kubernetes operator with persistent volumes for index data, and high-availability clusters spread primary and replica shards across nodes so the cluster keeps serving reads and writes through a node failure.