Book Image

Mastering Elasticsearch 5.x - Third Edition

Book Image

Mastering Elasticsearch 5.x - Third Edition

Overview of this book

Elasticsearch is a modern, fast, distributed, scalable, fault tolerant, and open source search and analytics engine. Elasticsearch leverages the capabilities of Apache Lucene, and provides a new level of control over how you can index and search even huge sets of data. This book will give you a brief recap of the basics and also introduce you to the new features of Elasticsearch 5. We will guide you through the intermediate and advanced functionalities of Elasticsearch, such as querying, indexing, searching, and modifying data. We’ll also explore advanced concepts, including aggregation, index control, sharding, replication, and clustering. We’ll show you the modules of monitoring and administration available in Elasticsearch, and will also cover backup and recovery. You will get an understanding of how you can scale your Elasticsearch cluster to contextualize it and improve its performance. We’ll also show you how you can create your own analysis plugin in Elasticsearch. By the end of the book, you will have all the knowledge necessary to master Elasticsearch and put it to efficient use.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Chapter 1.  Revisiting Elasticsearch and the Changes

Welcome to Mastering Elasticsearch 5.x, Third Edition. Elasticsearch has progressed rapidly from version 1.x, released in 2014, to version 5.x, released in 2016. During the two-and-a-half-year period since 1.0.0, adoption has skyrocketed, and both vendors and the community have committed bug-fixes, interoperability enhancements, and rich feature upgrades to ensure Elasticsearch remains the most popular NoSQL storage, indexing, and search utility for both structured and unstructured documents, as well as gaining popularity as a log analysis tool as part of the Elastic Stack.

We treat Mastering Elasticsearch as a book that will systematize your knowledge about Elasticsearch, and extend it by showing some examples of how to leverage your knowledge in certain situations. If you are looking for a book that will help you start your journey into the world of Elasticsearch, please take a look at Elasticsearch Essentials, also published by Packt.

Before going further into the book, we assume that you already know the basic concepts of Elasticsearch for performing operations such as how to index documents, how to send queries to get the documents you are interested in, how to narrow down the results of your queries by using filters, and how to calculate statistics for your data with the use of the aggregation mechanism. However, before getting to the exciting functionality that Elasticsearch offers, we think we should start with a quick overview of Apache Lucene, which is a full text search library that Elasticsearch uses to build and search its indices. We also need to make sure that we understand Lucene correctly, as Mastering Elasticsearch requires this understanding. By the end of this chapter, we will have covered the following topics:

  • An overview of Lucene and Elasticsearch
  • Introducing Elasticsearch 5.x
  • Latest features introduced in Elasticsearch
  • The changes in Elasticsearch after 1.x