OpenSearchCon North America 2026 unveils speaker line-up

The OpenSearch Software Foundation has announced the speaker schedule for OpenSearchCon North America 2026, which marks five years since the launch of the OpenSearch project.

The programme features speakers from Apple, AWS, CERN, IBM, Intel and LinkedIn, alongside sessions from engineering teams at Autodesk, Booking.com, Groupon, NetApp Instaclustr and Uber. The agenda will focus on search, observability, analytics and the use of OpenSearch in AI applications.

More than 60 keynotes, lightning talks, breakout sessions and developer workshops are planned. Topics include real-time monitoring, OpenTelemetry integrations, search architecture and agentic AI applications built on open source tools.

The schedule highlights a broad mix of infrastructure and application case studies, including an Apple presentation on metrics ingestion using Data Prepper, a CERN talk on monitoring OpenSearch clusters at scale, a Groupon session on real-time analytics, and a LinkedIn presentation on privacy-safe search analytics for advertising intelligence.

The event also serves as a marker of the project's growth since its launch as a fork five years ago. OpenSearch is now used across enterprise, government and non-profit settings for search, log analytics and observability workloads.

An upcoming study by Linux Foundation Research and the OpenSearch Software Foundation found that 77% of respondents viewed OpenSearch as an important core or supporting component for AI applications. Organisers are using that finding to frame this year's agenda around the role of open source infrastructure in AI systems.

OpenSearch has sought to position itself as a neutral open source project for organisations seeking alternatives in search and analytics infrastructure. The inclusion of operators such as CERN and large technology companies in the speaker line-up underlines real-world production use as competition in data and AI tooling intensifies.

Community focus

Bianca Lewis, Executive Director of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, linked the event to the project's development over the past five years.

"Over the last five years, OpenSearch has evolved from a fledgling fork to a thriving, community-driven project that powers critical infrastructure for leading companies, government organizations, and nonprofits around the world," said Lewis.

"As organizations increasingly rely on OpenSearch to power AI, observability, and mission-critical applications, our community continues to push the boundaries of what's possible through open collaboration," she added.

The agenda also reflects the close relationship between search and observability software. Sessions on OpenTelemetry and Prometheus integrations suggest OpenSearch users are working across multiple open source projects rather than treating search as a standalone discipline.

Jeffrey Sica of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation highlighted that interoperability.

"Open source infrastructure is strongest when projects can work together across communities and foundations to solve real-world challenges. CNCF projects like OpenTelemetry and Prometheus provide critical standards and capabilities for collecting and understanding telemetry data, while OpenSearch gives organizations another powerful way to analyze and act on that data at scale. These integrations highlight the broader value of the Linux Foundation ecosystem as independent projects and communities come together to build the base layer for complex observability and AI workloads," said Sica.

Operational use

Several sessions appear designed to give practitioners detailed examples of running OpenSearch in production. CERN is among the organisations set to discuss its use of the software in large-scale infrastructure.

"CERN has been with OpenSearch since day zero. Five years on, the project's continuous growth - in capability, in community, and in maturity - has more than validated that early commitment. Today we happily operate OpenSearch at 1.4-petabyte scale, trusting it as the backbone of our log analytics and search services. We're excited to share that operational experience with the community at OpenSearchCon NA 2026!" said Sokratis Papadopoulos, IT Service Manager, CERN.

The project's commercial ecosystem will also be represented. NetApp Instaclustr is among the organisations backing the event and speaking on the programme, reflecting the business opportunities continuing to develop around managed open source infrastructure.

"Every organization we partner with faces growing pressure to extract more value from their data - delivering faster insights, enabling smarter search, and powering AI-driven experiences are no longer optional. OpenSearch has become a critical enabler for these outcomes, and with NetApp Instaclustr, customers can be confident their infrastructure will never hold them back. OpenSearchCon North America brings together the ideal audience: hands-on practitioners tackling real-world challenges and seeking actionable solutions. We're excited to sponsor and speak at this event, and we look forward to the meaningful conversations and connections that only a gathering like this can inspire," said Sayandeb Saha, Head of Product, NetApp Instaclustr.