Developed in 2012, Elastic is an open source company that develops a distributed open source search engine based on Lucene. The history of Elastic starts with its main founder, Shay Banon, who wanted to explore making searching easier. In 2004, he released his first open source search-based product called Compass. This first iteration of open source search tools served as an inspiration, and, from Compass onward, searching has improved.
Around Elasticsearch grew a small community that would later lead to important partnerships that grew the company's capabilities. Jordan Sissel was working on a plugin ingestion tool named Logstash that sent the user logs to a stash, and Elasticsearch was one of those stashes. A visualization engine was needed and was provided by Rashid Khan, who was working on Kibana. Other contributors provided their own features and add-ons, and, hence, a stack of software was developed. The main product of Elastic continues to be Elasticsearch, and this is the focus of the following chapters.