Blog After Elastic Search
Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. Since its release in 2010, Elasticsearch has quickly become the most popular search engine and is commonly used for log analytics, full-text search, security intelligence, business analytics, and operational intelligence use cases.
On January 21, 2021, Elastic NV announced that they would change their software licensing strategy and not release new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the permissive Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2) license. Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic license, with source code available under the Elastic License or SSPL. These licenses are not open source and do not offer users the same freedoms. To ensure that the open source community and our customers continue to have a secure, high-quality, fully open source search and analytics suite, we introduced the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, ALv2 licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.
How does Elasticsearch work?
You can send data in the form of JSON documents to Elasticsearch using the API or ingestion tools such as Logstash and Amazon Kinesis Firehose. Elasticsearch automatically stores the original document and adds a searchable reference to the document in the cluster’s index. You can then search and retrieve the document using the Elasticsearch API. You can also use Kibana, a visualization tool, with Elasticsearch to visualize your data and build interactive dashboards.
You can run Apache 2.0 licensed Elasticsearch versions (up until version 7.10.2 & Kibana 7.10.2) on-premises, on Amazon EC2, or on Amazon OpenSearch Service. With on-premises or Amazon EC2 deployments, you are responsible for installing Elasticsearch and other necessary software, provisioning infrastructure, and managing the cluster. Amazon OpenSearch Service, on the other hand, is a fully managed service, so you don’t have to worry about time-consuming cluster management tasks such as hardware provisioning, software patching, failure recovery, backups, and monitoring.