The 1st Elastic search meetup in Brno

Code.kiwi.com organised the first Elasticsearch meetup in Brno on October 13. The event brought three speakers and more than 70 attendees to discuss this highly scalable open source search engine. Here’s a quick run through of what happened.

Elastic Stack Workshop by Philipp Krenn

One of the hottest and most widely used tools for log monitoring and analytics at the moment is the Elastic Stack:

• Elasticsearch does the hard work of analysing and searching large amounts of data
• Logstash and Beats collect the data
• Kibana is used to create powerful visualisations from that data

This workshop gave an overview of the four technologies, how they work together, and how they can solve your problems.

Full-Text Search Explained by Philipp Krenn

Today’s applications are expected to provide powerful, full-text search. But how does that work in general and how can it be implemented on a site or in an application? Actually, this is not as hard as it sounds at first. This talk covered:

• How full-text search works in general and how it differs from databases
• How the score or quality of a search result is calculated
• How to implement this with Elasticsearch

Attendees learnt how to add common search patterns to their applications without breaking a sweat.

You can find the presentation slides here

Beyond The Basics With Elasticsearch by Honza Král

Honza provided a walkthrough of some more advanced concepts and tools in Elasticsearch. He talked us through use cases for the `_percolate` API, manipulating the search results score with the `function_score` query, and using the `significant_terms` aggregation to extract meaningful connections between entities.

Our Persoo story with Elasticsearch by Jakub Černý

Elasticsearch is used by Persoo as one of the edge technologies for building their service. Persoo is a Software as a Service, or on-demand software company, which tracks visitor behaviour on websites and uses the collected data for personalisations: product recommendations, product filtering and targeted messages on all communication channels, eg personalised trigger emails.

Jakub showed us how Persoo uses Elasticsearch with some creative use cases. He also shared some practical experience and lessons they learnt over the last three years of using Elastic for more than 1k websites.