Elastic search, what is it exactly?

We are learning this as we go.

We are going to be honest here. We enlisted the help of our AI overlords for this one. Elastic search is an amazing technology we are learning. So much so, attempting to write about it without fully understanding it would be disingenuous. Acting as if we wrote this fully without AI would also be disingenuous. We wanted to be transparent and write about this amazing technology. Let us know what you think of this one.

Here we go!

Elasticsearch is a highly scalable, distributed, and open-source search engine. It is designed to index and search vast amounts of data quickly and efficiently, allowing users to perform complex searches and analytics on their data in real-time. Elasticsearch is built on top of Apache Lucene, a powerful open-source search library, and it uses a RESTful API, allowing developers to interact with it using various programming languages. We implement this in something called an ELK stack. We will make a Sub about this later.

At its core, Elasticsearch is a document-oriented search engine. It stores and indexes data as JSON documents, which can be queried using a variety of search criteria. These documents are organized into indexes, which are further divided into shards, or partitions of the index. Elasticsearch distributes these shards across a cluster of nodes, which work together to provide highly available and fault-tolerant search capabilities.

One of the key features of Elasticsearch is its ability to scale horizontally. It can handle large amounts of data and search queries by adding more nodes to the cluster. This allows Elasticsearch to handle massive amounts of data, making it an ideal choice for applications that require real-time search and analytics, such as e-commerce platforms, social networks, and log analysis tools.

To run Elasticsearch, you will need a few requirements. Firstly, you will need a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) installed on your system, as Elasticsearch is built using Java. You will also need to allocate sufficient resources, such as CPU and memory, to Elasticsearch, depending on the size of your data and the number of nodes in your cluster. Elasticsearch is designed to run on various operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and macOS. CENT OS is usually what we spin up virtually and where this lives.

In conclusion, Elasticsearch is a powerful and highly scalable search engine that is widely used in various applications, from e-commerce platforms to log analysis tools. It is built on top of Apache Lucene and uses a RESTful API, making it easy to integrate with various programming languages. Elasticsearch stores and indexes data as JSON documents, which are organized into indexes and shards, and distributed across a cluster of nodes. To run Elasticsearch, you will need a Java Virtual Machine, allocate sufficient resources, and choose an operating system that meets your requirements.

We hope this is an interesting topic, a little dry. Dryer than usual, AI really just shits stuff out doesnt it? Efficient though…

Thank you for reading. It means a lot and I hope the enlistment of AI for this one does not deter you from reading further.

Thank you,

-Hidalgo