Elasticsearch: What Is It, And Why You Need It?

I’m a big Elasticsearch fan and I’ve been using it since the early days. Here’s what it is, and why you might need it.

What is Elasticsearch?

I was using Elasticsearch when it was still a one-man-project from Shay Bannon, the original creator. At that time, around 2010, I was looking for a search technology that was scalable and easy to use, preferably open-source. I was not happy with the commercial and non-commercial products — until I found Elasticsearch. What a breeze! It was easy to use because it was all JSON; it scaled very well; it was blazing fast, and open-source! I’ve been using Elasticsearch in all kinds of situations and products since, and I’m still deeply in love with it.

To get started, let’s see what Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, has to say about this product first:

Elasticsearch is a distributed, open-source search and analytics engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured. Elasticsearch is built on Apache Lucene and was first released in 2010 by Elasticsearch N.V. (now known as Elastic). Known for its simple REST APIs, distributed nature, speed, and scalability, Elasticsearch is the central component of the Elastic Stack, a set of open-source tools for data ingestion, enrichment, storage, analysis, and visualization. (source)