--- title: "A Major Update to our On-Premise API Service" summary: "Yente 4.0 brings fast, incremental database updates and compatibility with AWS OpenSearch, making sanctions and PEP screening more efficient and easy-to-deploy." url: "https://www.opensanctions.org/articles/2024-07-24-yente4/" date_created: "2024-07-24T14:07:00.000Z" date_updated: "2025-08-17T08:25:05.227Z" tags: ["API","yente","Deltas"] image: "https://www.opensanctions.org/assets/1fdffae7-9f94-46a0-9725-ac41cf78727d/" --- Over the last 18 months, we’ve collaborated with numerous companies to deploy our [on-premise screening API](/docs/self-hosted/), `yente`, within their infrastructure. `yente` enables these organizations to establish a flexible and effective sanctions and PEP screening process, offering cost efficiency and robust data privacy. Two of the most commonly requested features of `yente` have been the need for rapid, incremental data updates in the service, and the ability to deploy `yente` to the AWS cloud [utilizing the OpenSearch service](https://aws.amazon.com/opensearch-service/) as a backend. In response, `yente` 4.0 focuses on easing the operational workload by adding support for incremental updates and the OpenSearch backend. ### Amazon’s Not-Quite-ElasticSearch Due to a licensing dispute with Elastic, Amazon ceased offering a hosted [ElasticSearch](https://www.elastic.co) service in 2021, creating their own engine, OpenSearch. While both engines perform similar functions, they are gradually diverging in API and scope. `yente` 4.0 now supports OpenSearch in self-hosted, AWS-hosted, and serverless modes, facilitating easy deployment as a cloud native application (e.g., using Fargate) and achieving auto-scaled performance with minimal operational complexity. ### What’s Changing? Previously, `yente` would also download a complete release of the OpenSanctions dataset multiple times a day. However, as our database’s size has grown, this process has become increasingly burdensome. Version 4.0 changes this by downloading [the full dataset](/datasets/default/) only once to build the initial backend index, and then updating itself using change data files between each new database version. This improvement allows for much quicker and resource-saving updates, ensuring the data used for screening is updated the instant we publish it. Moreover, the delta update mechanism developed for `yente` can be [utilized by other customers of the bulk data product](/faq/80/bulk-deltas/) as an easy way to keep their data synchronized with upstream changes. ### What’s Staying the Same? As highlighted, this major release aims to reduce the operational burden of running `yente` on your infrastructure. To simplify migration to this new version, we have decided not to make changes to the core element: scoring. The algorithms used to rank and score results remain unchanged from `yente` 3.8. While we plan to enhance the scoring and matching systems of `yente` in the future, our primary goal with 4.0 was to solidify the fundamental working of the service. ### How to Update to yente 4.0 The new version of `yente` is available as a docker image at `ghcr.io/opensanctions/yente:4.0.0`. Customers using the default `docker-compose.yml` can trigger an update by setting the new tag, and running `docker compose pull && docker compose restart app`. In order to reflect OpenSearch compatibility, we've renamed some of the environment variables used to configure the search index. See the [settings documentation](/docs/yente/settings/) for the relevant changes. As always, we're keen for [any feedback you may have](/support/)!