Bird Eye View - Elasticsearch

Its been a long time Elastic released a major version update. Last major release was 7.0 in April 2019. The long wait of 1023 days has resulted in making the platform release its major version 8.0 on Feb. 10, 2022.The message is clear, Elasticsearch is focusing on Relevance and focus is to enable easy onboarding with cloud.

What you see and What you get!

Elasticsearch embraces vector search capabilities, native support for modern natural language processing models, increasingly simplified data onboarding, and a streamlined security experience.

Technical Summary of the Relase

Here are the most anticipated and useful improvements for any existing elasticsearch user. Though this release covers more on bug fixes and enhancements below are the critical ones.

➔ Removes MovingAverage pipeline aggregation

➔ Avoids auto following leader system indices in CCR

➔ Set xpack.security.enabled to true for all licenses including basic license.

➔ Auto-configure TLS for new nodes of new clusters (saves lot of time!!) ➔ Support IAM roles for Kubernetes service accounts

➔ ML models use OS specific models

➔ Enable LZ4 compression at transport layer by default

➔ Reindex restart from checkpoint

➔ Allow listing older repositories

Whats New

Path to the world of NLP

- Have native integration and support for modern NLP models. It is much easier now to integrate these models directly into Elasticsearch and perform the NLP tasks more efficiently without having to moving out the data.

- This reduces lots of efforts which ideally used to go to coding. Added to the beauty of distributed computing power of Elasticsearch , NLP itself is significantly faster.

Powered with ANN search

- Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search helps to compare vector-based queries with a vector-based document corpus with speed and at scale.Again with the distributed setup ANN search gets more power and performant than ever. It is out of the box (OOTB) in Elasticsearch.

Easier Elastic Cloud Integration on AWS Marketplace

It is lot more easier to use Elasticsearch on AWS Marketplace than ever before, thanks to the cloud initiatives by Elastic.

- WIth the introduction of the new AWS Lambda Application , users can now ingest logs from Amazon S3 into their Elastic Cloud deployments with just a few clicks from within the AWS console.

- With Elastic’s Amazon S3 Storage Lens integration, users can easily ship Storage Lens metrics into their Elastic Cloud deployment, using the powerful search and analysis capabilities of Elasticsearch and powerful dashboarding capabilities of Kibana to optimize Amazon S3

Streamlined stack security

Elasticsearch v8.0 Release Reviews

- With in-product assistance like auto-generated tokens and certificates, Elastic have streamlined and simplified this process to save time and effort so that security is accessible by all.

- Also security is now enabled by default for self-managed clusters , where in earlier this was time consuming activity with efforts from experts.

Whats in it for me !

➔ Wide range of enhancements SQL,Search, Security and Infra components. ➔ There seems to be serious effort that has gone into improving and making REST API compatible with older version. Throughout we see good

enhancements and also few breaking changes. Looks like a effort to make elasticsearch more backward compatible with versions 7.17

➔ With more and more bug fixes, Machine Learning Jobs is now more accurate and bug fixes on aggregations makes it more powerful.

➔ As any tool upgrades,especially when we call a Major Release we tend to expect more on new features, butw however focus is on bug fixes and changes in security models.

Conclusion

Cleary there are efforts from the data search platform to cover powerful use cases like log analysis, content search , observability and SIEM. There is dedicated effort involved in order to draw the lines between Opensearch and Elasticsearch. Its always an interesting game to watch when 2 giants bring in the pool of talents to improve the search engine. At the end of the day customers are the winners!

How to Get Elasticsearch Support and Consulting:

We, at NextBrick offer Elasticsearch support and consulting services to manage your Elasticsearch cluster, we offer our extensive 24x7 expert support available in our managed offering.

As a decades old support and service providing company, we can only differentiate on price and support, and we care deeply about maintaining good support and solving our customers’ problems quickly. Contact-Us today!