Technology Focus: Elasticsearch

Our latest technology focus is on Elasticsearch. We caught up with Realm Digital’s Senior Developer, Zachie Du Bruyn to find out more about this open-source search engine.

What exactly is Elasticsearch?

The official tagline says it best: Elasticsearch is the most popular, open-source, cross-platform, distributed and scalable search-engine based on Lucene. It is written in Java and was released under the terms of the Apache License.

Elasticsearch is developed alongside Logstash and Kibana. Logstash is a data-collection and log-parsing engine while Kibana is an analytics and visualization platform. The three products combined are referred to as the Elastic Stack (formerly known as the ELK stack).

They are developed to provide integrated solutions and are designed to be used together for monitoring and reporting.

The first version of Elasticsearch was released in February 2010.

How does it work?

Elasticsearch is designed to take chunks (JSON documents) of big-data from different sources, like log files and databases to enable the user to analyze it and search through it.

It is optimized to work well with huge data sets and the searches happen very quickly, virtually in near real-time.

This is accomplished using the latest clustering methods to share tasks over more workers (nodes/servers), scaling horizontally instead of vertically.

Notable users include Adobe Systems, Netflix, Vimeo and Mozilla, to name but a few.

Why does Realm recommend Elasticsearch?

Realm Digital has successfully used Elasticsearch in many of our projects; especially in monitoring, and search solutions for e-commerce and CMS solutions.  If one needs to sift through large data sets fast, Elasticsearch is a great, reliable option.

If you would like to know more about Elasticsearch, or are interested in implementing it into your next project, contact Realm Digital today.