Book Image

Learning Elasticsearch

By : Abhishek Andhavarapu
Book Image

Learning Elasticsearch

By: Abhishek Andhavarapu

Overview of this book

Elasticsearch is a modern, fast, distributed, scalable, fault tolerant, and open source search and analytics engine. You can use Elasticsearch for small or large applications with billions of documents. It is built to scale horizontally and can handle both structured and unstructured data. Packed with easy-to- follow examples, this book will ensure you will have a firm understanding of the basics of Elasticsearch and know how to utilize its capabilities efficiently. You will install and set up Elasticsearch and Kibana, and handle documents using the Distributed Document Store. You will see how to query, search, and index your data, and perform aggregation-based analytics with ease. You will see how to use Kibana to explore and visualize your data. Further on, you will learn to handle document relationships, work with geospatial data, and much more, with this easy-to-follow guide. Finally, you will see how you can set up and scale your Elasticsearch clusters in production environments.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
10
Exploring Elastic Stack (Elastic Cloud, Security, Graph, and Alerting)

Introduction to Elasticsearch

In this chapter, we will focus on the basic concepts of Elasticsearch. We will start by explaining the building blocks and then discuss how to create, modify and query in Elasticsearch. Getting started with Elasticsearch is very easy; most operations come with default settings. The default settings can be overridden when you need more advanced features.

I first started using Elasticsearch in 2012 as a backend search engine to power our Analytics dashboards. It has been more than five years, and I never looked for any other technologies for our search needs. Elasticsearch is much more than just a search engine; it supports complex aggregations, geo filters, and the list goes on. Best of all, you can run all your queries at a speed you have never seen before. To understand how this magic happens, we will briefly discuss how Elasticsearch works internally and then discuss how to talk to Elasticsearch. Knowing how it works internally will help you understand its strengths and limitations. Elasticsearch, like any other open source technology, is very rapidly evolving, but the core fundamentals that power Elasticsearch don't change. By the end of this chapter, we will have covered the following:

  • Basic concepts of Elasticsearch
  • How to interact with Elasticsearch
  • How to create, read, update, and delete
  • How does search work
  • Availability and horizontal scalability
  • Failure handling
  • Strengths and limitations