OpenSearch isn't trying to be a better Elasticsearch anymore

If you inherited an OpenSearch deployment and you're now being asked to run agents on it, Q1 2026 has been unusually good news. OpenSearch 3.5 (February) and 3.6 (April) aren't incremental search improvements — they're a clear declaration of intent. "OpenSearch isn't trying to be a better Elasticsearch; it is focused on being the data layer on which AI applications are built." That's from the article's author, an engineer who's been migrating teams from log analytics to semantic retrieval. It al