In just a few years, Elasticsearch has been downloaded over 10 million times to meet developers’ increasing need to search and analyze large volumes of data. Elasticsearch has been successful at GitHub, where they use it to index 2 billion documents (which are constantly being modified) to power their site search; and at SoundCloud, where it’s used as a main form of site navigation for 40 million users.

Today, we’re happy to announce the release of Click to Deploy for Elasticsearch on Google Compute Engine. You can set up an Elasticsearch cluster configured to your needs in just a few clicks.

 If you haven’t tried Elasticsearch yet, here are 3 reasons to take a closer look:
  1. Based on Lucene: Elasticsearch is an open source document-oriented search server based on Lucene. Lucene is a time tested open source library that is capable of reading everything from HTML to PDFs.

  1. Designed for cloud: Elasticsearch was designed first for the cloud with its capabilities around simple cluster configuration and discovery and high-availability by default. This means you can expand your Elasticsearch deployment simply by adding new nodes. This expansion of your cluster — or in in the case of a hardware failure, reduction — results in automatic reconfiguration of your document indices across the cluster.  
  1. Native use of JSON over HTTP: Extending the platform is simple for developers. The schema doesn’t need to be defined up front and your cluster can be extended with a variety of libraries in your languages of choice, even using the command line.

 Once Elasticsearch is up and running, a variety of use cases are available immediately: keyword text search for your web app, log processing and analysis with Logstash, and simple data visualization with Kibana. These three open source projects are now tightly integrated, supported by the Elasticsearch company, and are known collectively as The ELK Stack.

 If you need help extending the platform in your environment, support, training, and commercial plugins are available from Elasticsearch.

-Posted by Chris Pomeroy, Program Manager