Menu
Home Explore People Places Arts History Plants & Animals Science Life & Culture Technology
On this page
Elasticsearch
A distributed, scalable, and highly available real-time search platform with a RESTful API.

Elasticsearch is a search engine based on Apache Lucene, a free and open-source search engine. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Official clients are available in Java, .NET (C#), PHP, Python, Ruby and many other languages. According to the DB-Engines ranking, Elasticsearch is the most popular enterprise search engine.

Related Image Collections Add Image
We don't have any YouTube videos related to Elasticsearch yet.
We don't have any PDF documents related to Elasticsearch yet.
We don't have any Books related to Elasticsearch yet.
We don't have any archived web articles related to Elasticsearch yet.

History

Shay Banon created the precursor to Elasticsearch, called Compass, in 2004.8 While thinking about the third version of Compass he realized that it would be necessary to rewrite big parts of Compass to "create a scalable search solution".9 So he created "a solution built from the ground up to be distributed" and used a common interface, JSON over HTTP, suitable for programming languages other than Java as well.10 Shay Banon released the first version of Elasticsearch in February 2010.11

Elastic NV was founded in 2012 to provide commercial services and products around Elasticsearch and related software.12 In June 2014, the company announced raising $70 million in a Series C funding round, just 18 months after forming the company. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Additional funders include Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures. This round brought total funding to $104M.13

In March 2015, the company Elasticsearch changed its name to Elastic.14

In June 2018, Elastic filed for an initial public offering with an estimated valuation of between 1.5 and 3 billion dollars.15 On 5 October 2018, Elastic was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.16

Developed from the Found acquisition by Elastic in 2015,17 Elastic Cloud is a family of Elasticsearch-powered SaaS offerings which include the Elasticsearch Service, as well as Elastic App Search Service, and Elastic Site Search Service which were developed from Elastic's acquisition of Swiftype.18 In late 2017, Elastic formed partnerships with Google to offer Elastic Cloud in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Alibaba to offer Elasticsearch and Kibana in Alibaba Cloud.

Elasticsearch Service users can create secure deployments with partners, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Alibaba Cloud.19

Licensing changes

In January 2021, Elastic announced that starting with version 7.11, they would be relicensing their Apache 2.0 licensed code in Elasticsearch and Kibana to be dual licensed under Server Side Public License and the Elastic License, neither of which is recognized as an open-source license.2021 Elastic blamed Amazon Web Services (AWS) for this change, objecting to AWS offering Elasticsearch and Kibana as a service directly to consumers and claiming that AWS was not appropriately collaborating with Elastic.2223 Critics of the re-licensing decision predicted that it would harm Elastic's ecosystem and noted that Elastic had previously promised to "never....change the license of the Apache 2.0 code of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash". Amazon responded with plans to fork the projects and continue development under Apache License 2.0.2425 Other users of the Elasticsearch ecosystem, including Logz.io, CrateDB and Aiven, also committed to the need for a fork, leading to a discussion of how to coordinate the open source efforts.262728 Due to potential trademark issues with using the name "Elasticsearch", AWS rebranded their fork as OpenSearch in April 2021.2930

In August 2024 the GNU Affero General Public License was added to ElasticSearch version 8.16.0 as an option, making Elasticsearch free and open-source again.3132

Features

Elasticsearch can be used to search any kind of document. It provides scalable search, has near real-time search, and supports multitenancy.33 "Elasticsearch is distributed, which means that indices can be divided into shards and each shard can have zero or more replicas. Each node hosts one or more shards and acts as a coordinator to delegate operations to the correct shard(s). Rebalancing and routing are done automatically".34 Related data is often stored in the same index, which consists of one or more primary shards, and zero or more replica shards. Once an index has been created, the number of primary shards cannot be changed.35

Elasticsearch is developed alongside the data collection and log-parsing engine Logstash, the analytics and visualization platform Kibana, and the collection of lightweight data shippers called Beats. The four products are designed for use as an integrated solution, referred to as the "Elastic Stack".36 (Formerly the "ELK stack", short for "Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana".)

Elasticsearch uses Lucene and tries to make all its features available through the JSON and Java API37 . It supports facetting and percolating (a form of prospective search),3839 which can be useful for notifying if new documents match for registered queries. Another feature, "gateway", handles the long-term persistence of the index;40 for example, an index can be recovered from the gateway in the event of a server crash. Elasticsearch supports real-time GET requests, which makes it suitable as a NoSQL datastore,41 but it lacks distributed transactions.42

On 20 May 2019, Elastic made the core security features of the Elastic Stack available free of charge, including TLS for encrypted communications, file and native realm for creating and managing users, and role-based access control for controlling user access to cluster APIs and indexes.43 The corresponding source code is available under the “Elastic License”, a source-available license.44 In addition, Elasticsearch now offers SIEM45 and Machine Learning46 as part of its offered services.

See also

References

  1. "Elasticsearch Java Client". github.com. Retrieved 7 October 2022. https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-java/

  2. "Elasticsearch .NET Client". github.com. Retrieved 7 October 2022. https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-net/

  3. "Elasticsearch PHP Client". github.com. Retrieved 7 October 2022. https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-php/

  4. "Elasticsearch Python Client". github.com. Retrieved 7 October 2022. https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-py/

  5. "Elasticsearch Ruby Client". github.com. Retrieved 7 October 2022. https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-ruby/

  6. "Programming Language Clients". elastic.co. Archived from the original on 2 April 2023. Retrieved 7 October 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20230402031738/https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/enterprise-search/master/programming-language-clients.html

  7. "DB-Engines Ranking - popularity ranking of search engines". db-engines.com. Retrieved 10 January 2016. http://db-engines.com/en/ranking/search+engine

  8. Banon, Shay (7 July 2010). "The Future of Compass & ElasticSearch". http://thedudeabides.com/articles/the_future_of_compass

  9. Banon, Shay (7 July 2010). "The Future of Compass & ElasticSearch". http://thedudeabides.com/articles/the_future_of_compass

  10. Banon, Shay (7 July 2010). "The Future of Compass & ElasticSearch". http://thedudeabides.com/articles/the_future_of_compass

  11. Banon, Shay (8 February 2010). "You Know, for Search". Archived from the original on 16 January 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20130116045454/http://www.elasticsearch.org/blog/2010/02/08/youknowforsearch.html

  12. "Immediate Insight from Data Matters". elastic.co. Retrieved 25 March 2015. https://www.elastic.co/about

  13. Miller, Ron (5 June 2014). "ElasticSearch Scores $70M In Series C To Fund Growth Spurt". TechCrunch. AOL. Retrieved 4 April 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/05/elasticsearch-scores-70m-in-series-c-to-fund-growth-spurt/

  14. "Elasticsearch Changes Name to Elastic to Reflect Wide Adoption Beyond Search". Elastic.co. 10 March 2015. Retrieved 19 October 2016. https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elasticsearch-changes-name-to-elastic-to-reflect-wide-adoption-beyond-search

  15. Schleifer, Theodore (21 June 2018). "The IPOs keep coming: The search company Elastic has filed to go public". Recode. Archived from the original on 5 October 2018. Retrieved 22 June 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20181005131020/https://www.recode.net/2018/6/21/17491102/elastic-elasticsearch-ipo-confidential-filing-wall-street

  16. Banon, Shay (5 October 2018). "Ze Bell Has Rung: Thank You Users, Customers, and Partners". Elastic (NV). Retrieved 24 October 2018. https://www.elastic.co/blog/ze-bell-has-rung-thank-you-users-customers-and-partners

  17. Oliver, Andrew C. (10 March 2015). "Elasticsearch buys into search as a service, rebrands as 'Elastic'". InfoWorld.com. Retrieved 1 April 2019. https://www.infoworld.com/article/2894955/elasticsearch-buys-into-search-as-service-rebrands-as-elastic.html

  18. Ha, Anthony (9 November 2017). "Elastic acquires search startup Swiftype". TechCrunch. Retrieved 3 April 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/09/elastic-acquires-swiftype/

  19. Yegulalp, Serdar (7 April 2017). "Google Cloud to host open source Elasticsearch". InfoWorld.com. Retrieved 1 April 2019. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3188332/google-cloud-to-host-open-source-elasticsearch.html

  20. Banon, Shay (14 January 2021). "Doubling down on open, Part II". Elastic. Retrieved 19 January 2021. https://www.elastic.co/blog/licensing-change

  21. Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. "Elastic changes open-source license to monetize cloud-service use". ZDNet. Retrieved 23 January 2021. https://www.zdnet.com/article/elastic-changes-open-source-license-to-monetize-cloud-service-use/

  22. Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. "Elastic changes open-source license to monetize cloud-service use". ZDNet. Retrieved 23 January 2021. https://www.zdnet.com/article/elastic-changes-open-source-license-to-monetize-cloud-service-use/

  23. Banon, Shay (19 January 2021). "Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing". Elastic. Retrieved 19 January 2021. https://www.elastic.co/blog/why-license-change-AWS

  24. Banon, Shay (29 August 2024). "Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again". https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-again

  25. "Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch". Amazon Web Services. 21 January 2021. Retrieved 28 January 2021. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/stepping-up-for-a-truly-open-source-elasticsearch/

  26. Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. "AWS, as predicted, is forking Elasticsearch". ZDNet. Retrieved 28 January 2021. https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-as-predicted-is-forking-elasticsearch/

  27. "CrateDB Doubling Down on Permissive Licensing and the Elasticsearch Lockdown". CrateDB. 27 January 2021. Retrieved 28 January 2021. https://crate.io/a/cratedb-doubling-down-on-permissive-licensing-and-the-elasticsearch-lockdown/

  28. "Momentum Builds to Break Elasticsearch Licensing Deadlock". Datanami. 25 January 2021. Retrieved 31 January 2021. https://www.datanami.com/2021/01/25/momentum-builds-to-break-elasticsearch-licensing-deadlock/

  29. Anderson, Tim (13 April 2021). "You know what? Fork this: AWS renames its take on Elasticsearch to OpenSearch following trademark fight". The Register. Retrieved 13 April 2021. https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/13/aws_renames_elasticsearch_fork_opensearch/

  30. TheRegister (12 Sep 2021) Amazon Elasticsearch Service is so flexible it wants to be called by a new name https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/09/12/0321258/amazon-renames-its-open-source-fork-of-elasticsearch-amazon-opensearch-service

  31. Banon, Shay (29 August 2024). "Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again". https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-is-open-source-again

  32. "Add AGPLv3 as a supported license · elastic/elasticsearch@0279c0a". GitHub. Retrieved 13 April 2025. https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/commit/0279c0a909adebd89cc139e05d7f1d170f5fed96

  33. "Official Website". Elasticsearch.org. Retrieved 4 February 2014. http://www.elasticsearch.org/

  34. "Official Website". Elasticsearch.org. Retrieved 4 February 2014. http://www.elasticsearch.org/

  35. "How to monitor Elasticsearch performance". How to monitor Elasticsearch performance. 26 September 2016. https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/monitor-elasticsearch-performance-metrics/

  36. Miller, Ron (26 October 2016). "Elastic brings order to its product line with Elastic Stack". TechCrunch. Retrieved 3 April 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/26/elastic-finally-brings-order-to-its-product-line-with-elastic-stack/

  37. Shay Banon; Simon Willnauer; David Pilato; Martijn van Groningen; Robert Muir; Clinton Gormley; Luca Cavanna; Adrien Grand; Boaz Leskes; Ryan Ernst; Igor Motov; Britta Weber; Alexander Reelsen; Lee Hinman; Michael McCandless; Colin Goodheart-Smithe; Christoph Büscher; Nik Everett; Karel Minarik; Jason Tedor; Honza Král; uboness; Drew Raines; Tanguy Leroux; Alex Ksikes; Zachary Tong; Nick Knize; Jun Ohtani; Brian Murphy; markharwood (5 April 2015). "RedWinterDawn/elasticsearch:15159380". GitHub. doi:10.5281/zenodo.15159380. Retrieved 9 May 2025. https://github.com/RedWinterDawn/elasticsearch

  38. "percolate at elasticsearch.org reference". Elasticsearch.org. Archived from the original on 2 October 2013. Retrieved 4 February 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20131002171546/http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/api/percolate/

  39. "Percolating" is a term peculiar to Elasticsearch. Percolating is a reverse search: instead of returning all the documents that match a search query, percolating returns all the (stored) search queries that match a document as their output. Nunn, Xavier; "Detecting data leaks in real time with a custom percolator", Serena Capital blogs, 2019-January-8 https://blog.serenacapital.com/detecting-data-leaks-in-real-time-with-a-custom-percolator-758bc6dc4fbb

  40. "elasticsearch Guide: Gateway". Elasticsearch.org. Retrieved 19 April 2013. http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/reference/modules/gateway/

  41. "Elasticsearch as database". Karussell.wordpress.com. 13 July 2011. Retrieved 4 February 2014. http://karussell.wordpress.com/2011/07/13/jetslide-uses-elasticsearch-as-database/

  42. "No transaction support". Elasticsearch-users.115913.n3.nabble.com. 8 July 2010. Archived from the original on 23 March 2020. Retrieved 4 February 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20200323100148/http://elasticsearch-users.115913.n3.nabble.com/Distributed-transaction-support-td951313.html

  43. "Security for Elasticsearch is now free". Elastic Blog. 20 May 2019. Retrieved 17 June 2019. https://www.elastic.co/blog/security-for-elasticsearch-is-now-free

  44. "Doubling Down on Open". Elastic Blog. 27 February 2018. Retrieved 24 October 2019. https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open

  45. "Introducing Elastic SIEM". Elastic Blog. 25 June 2019. Retrieved 2 March 2020. https://www.elastic.co/blog/introducing-elastic-siem

  46. "Introducing Machine Learning for the Elastic Stack". Elastic Blog. 4 May 2017. Retrieved 2 March 2020. https://www.elastic.co/blog/introducing-machine-learning-for-the-elastic-stack