Instaclustr is excited to announce the preview release of our managed service for Elasticsearch, a key data layer technology that joins our existing Apache Cassandra and Apache Kafka offerings on the Instaclustr Managed Platform.
Elasticsearch is a linearly scalable search technology that enables businesses to search “anything digital” at very high speeds, and offers flexibility, powerful search capabilities, and analytics features. Elasticsearch, based on Apache Lucene, was launched as an open source search technology licensed under Apache 2.0 over a decade ago. It has since become the de-facto choice for search technology. Elasticsearch is architected for elastic scaling, allowing customers the freedom to start small and increase its size as the data and search traffic increases. As a distributed technology, Elasticsearch offers high availability, reliability, and fault tolerance by design. All of these features make it the perfect choice for businesses that need search capability in their technology stack.
While everything you need to know to deploy and run Elasticsearch is well documented, it is one of the complex distributed technologies that needs a big operations team requiring significant initial and ongoing investment to architect the right Elasticsearch solution for your application. This entails index & cluster configuration, identifying right sized nodes, node failure handling, node replacement strategy, and cluster monitoring among 100 other things that are required to be in place before you can run a large scale Elasticsearch deployment. Once live, you need a team of experts on Elasticsearch, OS internals, Networking, Distributed systems, and Security & Compliance among 10s of other topics, to monitor the health of the cluster and manage its day-to-day operations. All this takes a lot of money, time, and effort and most significantly is a big distraction, removing the focus from your core business.
Many of our existing customers run Elasticsearch alongside Kafka and/or Cassandra and told us they would like us to bring our proven platform and managed service approach to the Elasticsearch market. We spent a significant amount of time discovering and validating customer challenges and market gaps. With this Preview release, we are very excited to work with them to migrate their Elasticsearch clusters onto our managed platform to deliver all search requirements through our fully managed Elasticsearch service on the Instaclustr platform.
The Preview Release
Instaclustr’s Elasticsearch offering is based on the Open Distro for Elasticsearch project which is a truly open sourced project under Apache 2.0 license containing no proprietary code. This contrasts with other open source projects that over time, end up with a mix of code with different licences.
The preview release includes the automation of key operational procedures including provisioning, scaling, monitoring, and alerting. Besides the customer visible management functions, there are several internal procedures automated including daily health check, node replacement, and other functions that enable our technical operations team to fulfil critical operational needs for failure or issue handling. Below is a list of key points related to the scope of this Preview release:
- Provision, configure, and monitor your cluster using the Instaclustr Management Console. Support for API in General Availability (GA) release.
- Support on AWS.
- Online horizontal scaling.
- Run in our cloud provider account with a fixed, infrastructure inclusive, cost or use your own cloud provider account.
- Security:
- Private Network Clusters
- TLS and HTTPS authentication for client connection
- Client to cluster data encryption
- Firewall settings and other network security settings
- Daily backups and manual restore.
- Monitoring and alerting for key metrics and events.
- 24×7 support with complex issues deferred to available SME’s timezone.
- Best-effort service with no SLA guarantees (SLAs will be offered in the GA release). Use for production only after an agreement with Instaclustr.
- Clusters created with this release will work with the GA release code when available with no requirement for manual migration.
More details on how to create Elasticsearch clusters and other interfaces are described on our Support site.
If you already have an account on our platform, try creating a test Elasticsearch cluster, follow the documentation to start indexing and search some documents in your cluster. If you are not yet a customer, create an account on the Instaclustr Management Console and make use of a free trial Elasticsearch cluster for 30 days. If you have any questions about our Elasticsearch offering, feel free to write to our Support or Customer Success teams. If you have any feature requests, reach us at [email protected].