An exciting start to Elastic{on} here in San Francisco, It started with a damp Pacific Northwest hug and a big thank you to the community of users and developers who make Elastic what it is.
For elastic as a search company, all of these use cases are search… This is the twist you see us putting on every challenge. — Shay Bannon
Shay has a point here. Whether you’re analyzing logs or medical claims, or maybe just trying to find an answer to a question, it’s all different flavors of search. This is the power of the Elastic Stack.
The biggest announcement of the keynote is the opening up of the code for the X-Packs.
What does this mean?
- The default download of ElasticSearch will include the free parts of the X-Pack (X-Pack Basic) enabled with unlimited perpetual license.
- You’ll still have to manually enable the paid parts of X-Pack and will get a one month free trial before having to provide a license key from Elastic.
- If you want to report a bug with X-Pack, you’ll do it the same way you do with the Open Source components, create an issue on Github!
Elastic wants to provide users the same experience across both OSS and their commercial offerings.
We also got to see a few interesting demos:
- Rollups: reduce data volume by consolidating historic information into fewer data points. Roll-up job runs in the background to create summary documents in a separate index. Consistent query syntax with normal indexes. Specify terms, metrics and granularity you want in the job. Don’t need to predefine specific charts. This is an exciting new feature for anyone who keeps large pools of historical data for statistical purposes and wants to reduce storage volumes.
- Application Performance Monitoring made simple: install the APM server, instrument your application with the agent by simply including it, see the data roll in. The instrumentation is automated when you add the agent to your app, no need to specifically instrument each endpoint. The visualizations allow you to drill down into stack traces, with code snippets if possible, for each request to troubleshoot performance problems and errors directly in Kibana. APM capabilities in Elastic bring a new edge to the monitoring capabilities in the stack. Bringing together logging data, infrastructure metrics and APM gives you the ability to get a 360 view of system performance. When you pair this with the existing capabilities of Perficient Distillr, our Operational Intelligence add-on for the Elastic Stack, and the new features of Canvas, it’s possible to further empower business users with their data.
- App search: still in beta, simple API for integrating search into your applications. Let’s you tune and adjust your results and priorities in real time, responding to analytics. This is a promising new feature that we’ll be watching closely over the coming months.
- Elastic cloud deployment flexibility: Today, all nodes have all roles, you pick a memory to disk ratio and that’s it. With the coming release you can choose different optimization strategies and size each role independently. This will allow for Elastic Cloud and Elastic Cloud Enterprise deployments to be further optimized for both cost and speed.
Look for more updates on Elastic{on} this week. We’re excited to be demonstrating our new product Nero in a discussion of how to prepare for Google Search Appliance obsolescence on Thursday at 11:30am in the Spotlight Theater, and at 1:30pm, also in the Spotlight Theater, I’ll be giving a quick talk on Elastic as a compliment to your Data Lake.
