Announcing: New search API for Jira Data Centre 10.4

[#1]

What’s changing

The new search API is now available as a replacement to the current Lucene search and index API which is now deprecated with the Jira 10.4 release.

The search API provides a comprehensive, agnostic and efficient index and search access method, addressing the limitations of the current access methods. This change additionally enables us to swap the underlying search platform with OpenSearch in future milestones.

Read the Jira search API upgrade notes for important info on the new search and index access methods.

What’s expected

As customers upgrade to Jira Data Center 10.4 we expect all apps to switch to the new search API because the older Lucene-specific methods are now deprecated and will be removed in future.

Timeline

Release of the search API is the first milestone in our larger program to replace the Lucene indexing process with OpenSearch for customers who choose to do so for Jira releases before Jira 11.0, as announced last year. From Jira 11.0, we'll stop providing Lucene as a dependency, and we’ll remove all APIs exposing Lucene.

We'll keep you posted as we progress further.

[Morten Stensgaard]

@Anubhav Dutt A bit confused on the latest news around the search engine within Jira - Personally thought OpenSearch was an Opt-In offering in DC? But now i read Lucene is being decommed - Is this change only for the API side for vendors/apps or will the search functionality within Jira change?

So how does this eventually impact the End-users experience on Jira DC?

Will they get?

• Better/More accurate search results?
• Better filtering/configurations options for searching?
• Faster searches?

Kind regards

Morten Stensgaard

[Prashant Bagdia]

Hi Morten,
Thank you for your inquiry.

The fundamental search functionality will largely remain unchanged. The Search API we're discussing acts as an abstraction layer over Lucene. This means that vendors and apps will need to transition to using the Search API instead of Lucene APIs. For customers, no immediate changes are necessary as we are handling the internal transition from Lucene API to Search API within Jira.

When we implement OpenSearch as the underlying method for the Search API, customers can anticipate improved index management and more consistent search results across their user base. The filtering and configuration options will remain the same. Additionally, searches may become faster due to OpenSearch's capability for horizontal scaling.

Please feel free to ask any further questions if you have any. 
Kind regards,
Prashant Bagdia
Product Manager

[Morten Stensgaard]

Hi @Prashant Bagdia 

Thanks for clarifying where/how this impacts the product/users - But sad to see that this is not impacting the end user experience when it comes to improving the search result quality - Especially for Confluence.

So just another developer/partner specific announcement here - Quite sure the end-users will never notice this change in their daily usage of DC products......Searches in Jira is actually quite fast from a user experience(If you maintain your Jira right)  

Kind regards

Morten Stensgaard