There is a lot of enterprises that have invested in elasticsearch infrastructure that would have seen great benefit with elasticsearch support.

Maybe you should ask your customers?

Probably will be completly ignored becaues of the statement made in https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-96112

Please also vote on https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-96112 for Elasticsearch support for Confluence.

We're paying premium price for the Atlassian stack and it's a shame version 8 isn't supported and version 9 is probably around the corner. Just like  833ca81f20cc is saying; we don't need to vote for this, support for Elasticsearch should be the norm.

A good guess why the switch to Opensearch is made, is because of AWS and Atlassian using it's services.

Somethin else, hearing about Confluence en moving it's search index to Opensearch is also a blow to paying customers. Why not use Elasticsearch and make it possible to use the same cluster for both applications. Looking at a blogpost from Elasticsearch about performance (https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-opensearch-performance-gap), Opensearch isn't quite up to the task.

We should not be required to "vote" for this issue.  This is what we pay Atlassian premium price for their products.  This is basic sustaining engineering and dependency lifecycle management that we already pay for; ElasticSearch (not bundled) is required for Bitbucket search, then Atlassian should be on-track with testing and providing support for ElasticSearch 8.x, especially since ES 8.0.0 has been available since February 2022.  Upstream support for ElasticSearch through elastic.co development provides patches for security and functionality defects for ElasticSearch 7.x until August 1 2023 or 6 months after ElasticSearch 9.0.0 is released (I swear they just recently added the "6 months after", but I don't have confirmation of that).  This is still pretty 11th hour to be considering support for ElasticSearch 8.x; Atlassian should have been considering support for 8.x when it was in alpha/beta.

Support for OpenSearch looks to be in a similar state (https://opensearch.org/releases.html#maintenance-policy) with Atlassian supporting 1.x only, and 2.x has been available since May 2022.

We are using at the moment an AWS Opensearch Service for enabling the search capability in bitbucket. We are moving away from AWS and towards Azure. on Azure we have to use a Elastic Search service for Bitbucket and the new service only supports Elastic search version 8.x according to the companies policies. The policy is enforced because ES 7.x will be EOL end of the year. 

This is important as Bitbucket is the last application we run which does not support Elasticsearch 8, requiring us to maintain legacy systems specifically for it.

This might involve updating Buckler, so mentioning it as a keyword here.