'Distro' makes it sound like a linux-distribution with, in this case, Elasticsearch installed on it. From what I read on the page and on the aws blog this is not the case though?
I thought the same thing. After some searching I realized that "Open Distro" isn't actually a linux distro after all. This is a non-fork release of Elasticsearch with the proprietary parts stripped out.
In what why did they deliberately make the meaning unclear? The middle of the page says "An Apache 2.0-licensed distribution of Elasticsearch". It's saying in black and white that it's a distribution of Elasticsearch, not of an operating system.
Hi, I work at AWS on compute services, but spent a lot of my life building Linux distros.
For those of us with Linux distro building experience, this may be initially confusing. But calling a curated collection of software a "distro" has been used for decades outside of Linux distributions.
"Distro" is short for distribution. Many things, not just operating systems, can have different distributions. Calling it a distro doesn't make it sound like a linux distribution at all. If it was a linux distribution it would probably talk about being an OS and not being a distribution of Elasticsearch.
At least in Kubernetes land, that lead to the foundation (CNCF) creating a certified Kubernetes conformance program, to avoid end user confusion and establish a baseline feature set.
Another example from years past, would have been openstack, with many vendors shipping/selling their own branded variants.
Thank you for your input. I tried to google that, but I don't see any heavy usage of "distro" along with those solutions.
For example site:https://hadoop.apache.org distro nothing significant. Also, googled "Kubernetes distro" same thing.
I can assure you (within the k8s dev community anyway) that "distro" is used to refer to companies productised versions.
Look at any of the long term support discussions, and distros will be mentioned.
Same goes for OpenStack - we refer to the different vendor products as distros (this is complicated by most of the OpenStack in a box products being produced by Linux distros, but we mean all product versions of OpenStack when we was OpenStack distro)
I guess you could argue that "distro" has a distinct meaning to "distribution" with the former specifically pertaining to linux distributions, but I think most people probably just interpret it as being shorthand for the latter
just googling "hadoop distro", without limiting it to the hadoop website, finds lots of references to people and media outlets using distro as a shorthand.
