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feat: OpenSearch backend support for HA and air-gapped deployments #20944

@devrimsen

Description

@devrimsen

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

Feature Request

We are evaluating artifact-keeper as a replacement for Nexus Repository Manager in our infrastructure, and we would love to see native OpenSearch support added to make this transition fully viable.
Our environment has the following constraints and requirements:

We operate in an air-gapped network, where external licensing calls and proprietary software are not an option
We require High Availability for our artifact proxy/cache layer, as it is a critical dependency in our CI/CD pipeline
We are committed to a fully open-source, zero-cost toolchain

We evaluated Meilisearch as an alternative search backend, but its HA/clustering capability is locked behind a paid Enterprise edition — making it not a truly free and open-source solution for production use. OpenSearch, on the other hand, is fully open-source, freely distributable, natively supports clustering for HA, and maintains API compatibility with Elasticsearch. This makes it the most suitable candidate for our use case.
Adding OpenSearch support to artifact-keeper would directly enable teams like ours to replace Nexus Repository Manager with a modern, open-source alternative — without compromising on availability, licensing freedom, or air-gap compatibility.
It is worth noting that this feature would not only benefit artifact-keeper users — it would also grow the OpenSearch ecosystem itself. Every organization that adopts artifact-keeper with OpenSearch as its backend becomes a new OpenSearch deployment, expanding its community, its real-world adoption, and its visibility as the go-to open-source search solution for enterprise infrastructure. There is a large and underserved audience of teams running air-gapped, cost-conscious, or Nexus-replacement workloads who are actively looking for exactly this kind of integration. This feature request speaks for all of them.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add native OpenSearch support to artifact-keeper as a pluggable backend search/index engine, usable as a drop-in alternative to Elasticsearch. This would unlock the following:

HA deployments: OpenSearch's native clustering allows artifact-keeper to run in a resilient, multi-node configuration suitable for production CI/CD environments
Air-gapped environments: OpenSearch is freely distributable and requires no external license validation, making it fully compatible with isolated networks
Cost reduction: Eliminates any dependency on paid search backends (e.g., Elasticsearch licenses or Meilisearch Enterprise), keeping the entire stack truly open-source and free
Ecosystem growth for OpenSearch: Each new artifact-keeper deployment backed by OpenSearch is a net gain for the OpenSearch community, driving broader adoption across enterprise and government infrastructure worldwide

Since OpenSearch maintains strong API compatibility with Elasticsearch, the implementation effort should be relatively low if Elasticsearch is already supported. Ideally, this would follow the same configuration pattern — simply pointing to an OpenSearch endpoint — with minimal divergence in the integration layer.
We believe this is a high-impact, relatively low-effort feature that serves a wide range of users: DevOps teams migrating away from Nexus, organizations bound by open-source licensing policies, and infrastructure teams in air-gapped or regulated environments. We would be happy to assist with testing or provide feedback during implementation.

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