Elasticsearch

Last updated

Elasticsearch
Original author(s) Shay Banon
Developer(s) Elastic NV
Initial release8 February 2010;14 years ago (2010-02-08)
Stable release
8.x8.15.0 / 2 August 2024;2 months ago (2024-08-02) [1]
7.x7.17.21 / 2 May 2024;5 months ago (2024-05-02) [1]
Repository github.com/elastic/elasticsearch
Written in Java
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Search and index
License Triple-licensed Elastic License (proprietary; source-available), Server Side Public License (proprietary; source-available) and Affero General Public License (free and open-source)
Website www.elastic.co/elasticsearch/   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Elasticsearch is a search engine based on Apache Lucene. 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, [2] .NET [3] (C#), PHP, [4] Python, [5] Ruby [6] and many other languages. [7] According to the DB-Engines ranking, Elasticsearch is the most popular enterprise search engine. [8]

Contents

History

Shay Banon created the precursor to Elasticsearch, called Compass, in 2004. [9] 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. [9] Shay Banon released the first version of Elasticsearch in February 2010. [10]

Elastic NV was founded in 2012 to provide commercial services and products around Elasticsearch and related software. [11] 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. [12]

In March 2015, the company Elasticsearch changed its name to Elastic. [13]

In June 2018, Elastic filed for an initial public offering with an estimated valuation of between 1.5 and 3 billion dollars. [14] On 5 October 2018, Elastic was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. [15]

Developed from the Found acquisition by Elastic in 2015, [16] 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. [17] 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. [18]

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. [19] [20] 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. [20] [21] 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. [22] [23] 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. [24] [25] [26] Due to potential trademark issues with using the name "Elasticsearch", AWS rebranded their fork as OpenSearch in April 2021. [27] [28]

In August 2024 the GNU Affero General Public Licence was added as an option, making it free and open-source once again. [22]

Features

Elasticsearch can be used to search any kind of document. It provides scalable search, has near real-time search, and supports multitenancy. [29] "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". [29] 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. [30]

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". [31] (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 API. It supports facetting and percolating (a form of prospective search), [32]   [33] which can be useful for notifying if new documents match for registered queries. Another feature, "gateway", handles the long-term persistence of the index; [34] 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, [35] but it lacks distributed transactions. [36]

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. [37] The corresponding source code is available under the “Elastic License”, a source-available license. [38] In addition, Elasticsearch now offers SIEM [39] and Machine Learning [40] as part of its offered services.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MySQL</span> SQL database engine software

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database organizes data into one or more data tables in which data may be related to each other; these relations help structure the data. SQL is a language that programmers use to create, modify and extract data from the relational database, as well as control user access to the database. In addition to relational databases and SQL, an RDBMS like MySQL works with an operating system to implement a relational database in a computer's storage system, manages users, allows for network access and facilitates testing database integrity and creation of backups.

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A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) defines the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to a company/project, typically software under an open source license.

A database shard, or simply a shard, is a horizontal partition of data in a database or search engine. Each shard is held on a separate database server instance, to spread load.

MongoDB is a source-available, cross-platform, document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database product, MongoDB utilizes JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and current versions are licensed under the Server Side Public License (SSPL). MongoDB is a member of the MACH Alliance.

Redis is a source-available, in-memory storage, used as a distributed, in-memory key–value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. Because it holds all data in memory and because of its design, Redis offers low-latency reads and writes, making it particularly suitable for use cases that require a cache. Redis is the most popular NoSQL database, and one of the most popular databases overall. Redis is used in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Tinder, Yahoo, Adobe, Hulu, Amazon and OpenAI.

Amazon Relational Database Service is a distributed relational database service by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is a web service running "in the cloud" designed to simplify the setup, operation, and scaling of a relational database for use in applications. Administration processes like patching the database software, backing up databases and enabling point-in-time recovery are managed automatically. Scaling storage and compute resources can be performed by a single API call to the AWS control plane on-demand. AWS does not offer an SSH connection to the underlying virtual machine as part of the managed service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-core model</span> Business model monetizing commercial open-source software

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kibana</span> Data visualization plugin for Elasticsearch

Kibana is a source-available data visualization dashboard software for Elasticsearch.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ArangoDB</span> Multi-model database

ArangoDB is a graph database system developed by ArangoDB Inc. ArangoDB is a multi-model database system since it supports three data models with one database core and a unified query language AQL. AQL is mainly a declarative language and allows the combination of different data access patterns in a single query.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RocksDB</span> Embedded key-value database

RocksDB is a high performance embedded database for key-value data. It is a fork of Google's LevelDB optimized to exploit multi-core processors (CPUs), and make efficient use of fast storage, such as solid-state drives (SSD), for input/output (I/O) bound workloads. It is based on a log-structured merge-tree data structure. It is written in C++ and provides official language bindings for C++, C, and Java. Many third-party language bindings exist. RocksDB is free and open-source software, released originally under a BSD 3-clause license. However, in July 2017 the project was migrated to a dual license of both Apache 2.0 and GPLv2 license. This change helped its adoption in Apache Software Foundation's projects after blacklist of the previous BSD+Patents license clause.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elastic NV</span> Company behind search engine Elasticsearch

Elastic NV is an American-Dutch software company that provides self-managed and software as a service (SaaS) offerings for search, logging, security, observability, and analytics use cases. It was founded in 2012 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and was previously known as Elasticsearch.

The Server Side Public License (SSPL) is a source-available copyleft software license introduced by MongoDB Inc. in 2018.

OpenSearch is a family of software consisting of a search engine, and OpenSearch Dashboards, a data visualization dashboard for that search engine. It is an open-source project developed by the OpenSearch Software Foundation written primarily in Java.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trino (SQL query engine)</span> Open-source distributed SQL query engine

Trino is an open-source distributed SQL query engine designed to query large data sets distributed over one or more heterogeneous data sources. Trino can query data lakes that contain open column-oriented data file formats like ORC or Parquet residing on different storage systems like HDFS, AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage using the Hive and Iceberg table formats. Trino also has the ability to run federated queries that query tables in different data sources such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Kafka, MongoDB and Elasticsearch. Trino is released under the Apache License.

A vector database, vector store or vector search engine is a database that can store vectors along with other data items. Vector databases typically implement one or more Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) algorithms, so that one can search the database with a query vector to retrieve the closest matching database records.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Valkey</span> Freely available in-memory key–value database

Valkey is an open-source in-memory storage, used as a distributed, in-memory key–value database, cache and message broker, with optional durability. Because it holds all data in memory and because of its design, Valkey offers low-latency reads and writes, making it particularly suitable for use cases that require a cache. Valkey is the successor to Redis, the most popular NoSQL database, and one of the most popular databases overall. Valkey or its predecessor Redis are used in companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Tinder, Yahoo, Adobe, Hulu, Amazon and OpenAI.

References

  1. 1 2 "Releases · elastic/elasticsearch" . Retrieved 25 August 2023– via GitHub.
  2. ↑ "Elasticsearch Java Client". github.com. Retrieved 7 October 2022.
  3. ↑ "Elasticsearch .NET Client". github.com. Retrieved 7 October 2022.
  4. ↑ "Elasticsearch PHP Client". github.com. Retrieved 7 October 2022.
  5. ↑ "Elasticsearch Python Client". github.com. Retrieved 7 October 2022.
  6. ↑ "Elasticsearch Ruby Client". github.com. Retrieved 7 October 2022.
  7. ↑ "Programming Language Clients". elastic.co. Retrieved 7 October 2022.
  8. ↑ "DB-Engines Ranking - popularity ranking of search engines". db-engines.com. Retrieved 10 January 2016.
  9. 1 2 3 Banon, Shay (7 July 2010). "The Future of Compass & ElasticSearch".
  10. ↑ Banon, Shay (8 February 2010). "You Know, for Search". Archived from the original on 16 January 2013.
  11. ↑ "Immediate Insight from Data Matters". elastic.co. Retrieved 25 March 2015.
  12. ↑ Miller, Ron (5 June 2014). "ElasticSearch Scores $70M In Series C To Fund Growth Spurt". TechCrunch. AOL. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
  13. ↑ "Elasticsearch Changes Name to Elastic to Reflect Wide Adoption Beyond Search". Elastic.co. 10 March 2015. Retrieved 19 October 2016.
  14. ↑ 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.
  15. ↑ Banon, Shay (5 October 2018). "Ze Bell Has Rung: Thank You Users, Customers, and Partners". Elastic (NV). Retrieved 24 October 2018.
  16. ↑ Oliver, Andrew C. (10 March 2015). "Elasticsearch buys into search as a service, rebrands as 'Elastic'". InfoWorld.com. Retrieved 1 April 2019.
  17. ↑ Ha, Anthony (9 November 2017). "Elastic acquires search startup Swiftype". TechCrunch . Retrieved 3 April 2024.
  18. ↑ Yegulalp, Serdar (7 April 2017). "Google Cloud to host open source Elasticsearch". InfoWorld.com. Retrieved 1 April 2019.
  19. ↑ Banon, Shay (14 January 2021). "Doubling down on open, Part II". Elastic. Retrieved 19 January 2021.
  20. 1 2 Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. "Elastic changes open-source license to monetize cloud-service use". ZDNet. Retrieved 23 January 2021.
  21. ↑ Banon, Shay (19 January 2021). "Amazon: NOT OK - why we had to change Elastic licensing". Elastic. Retrieved 19 January 2021.
  22. 1 2 Banon, Shay (29 August 2024). "Elasticsearch is Open Source, Again".
  23. ↑ "Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch". Amazon Web Services. 21 January 2021. Retrieved 28 January 2021.
  24. ↑ Vaughan-Nichols, Steven J. "AWS, as predicted, is forking Elasticsearch". ZDNet. Retrieved 28 January 2021.
  25. ↑ "CrateDB Doubling Down on Permissive Licensing and the Elasticsearch Lockdown". CrateDB. 27 January 2021. Retrieved 28 January 2021.
  26. ↑ "Momentum Builds to Break Elasticsearch Licensing Deadlock". Datanami. 25 January 2021. Retrieved 31 January 2021.
  27. ↑ 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.
  28. ↑ TheRegister (12 Sep 2021) Amazon Elasticsearch Service is so flexible it wants to be called by a new name
  29. 1 2 "Official Website". Elasticsearch.org. Retrieved 4 February 2014.
  30. ↑ "How to monitor Elasticsearch performance". How to monitor Elasticsearch performance. 26 September 2016.
  31. ↑ Miller, Ron (26 October 2016). "Elastic brings order to its product line with Elastic Stack". TechCrunch . Retrieved 3 April 2024.
  32. ↑ "percolate at elasticsearch.org reference". Elasticsearch.org. Archived from the original on 2 October 2013. Retrieved 4 February 2014.
  33. ↑ "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
  34. ↑ "elasticsearch Guide: Gateway". Elasticsearch.org. Retrieved 19 April 2013.
  35. ↑ "Elasticsearch as database". Karussell.wordpress.com. 13 July 2011. Retrieved 4 February 2014.
  36. ↑ "No transaction support". Elasticsearch-users.115913.n3.nabble.com. 8 July 2010. Retrieved 4 February 2014.
  37. ↑ "Security for Elasticsearch is now free". Elastic Blog. 20 May 2019. Retrieved 17 June 2019.
  38. ↑ "Doubling Down on Open". Elastic Blog. 27 February 2018. Retrieved 24 October 2019.
  39. ↑ "Introducing Elastic SIEM". Elastic Blog. 25 June 2019. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
  40. ↑ "Introducing Machine Learning for the Elastic Stack". Elastic Blog. 4 May 2017. Retrieved 2 March 2020.
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