When even the commercial vendors are using it, has open source search won?

Posted on March 15, 2018 by Charlie Hull

There have been some interesting announcements recently which may point to an increasing realisation amongst commercial search firms that an open source model is an essential advantage in today's search market. Coveo have announced that their enterprise search engine can run on an Elasticsearch core, an interesting move for a previously decidedly closed source company. BA Insight, who have previou...Continue reading

No, Elastic X-Pack is not going to be open source – according to Elastic themselves

Posted on March 2, 2018 by Charlie Hull

Elastic are the company founded by the creator of Elasticsearch, Shay Banon. At this time of year they have their annual Elasticon conference in San Francisco and as you might expect a lot of announcements are made during the week of the conference. The major ones to appear this time are that Swiftype, which Elastic acquired last year, has reappeared as Elastic Site Search and that Elastic are opening the code for their commercial X-Pack features. More

Elastic acquires Swiftype and broadens its offering to include enterprise search

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Charlie Hull

The news today that Elastic (the company behind the open source Elasticsearch software) has acquired Swiftype will have surprised a few people, even though Elastic has already acquired a good number of other companies. Swiftype have a couple of products that deliver cloud-based site and enterprise search and under the hood, all of this is built on Elasticsearch. Swiftype are part of a new ...Continue reading

Better performance with the Logstash DNS filter

Posted on August 17, 2017 by Tom

We've been working on a project for a customer which uses Logstash to read messages from Kafka and write them to Elasticsearch. It also parses the messages into fields, and depending on the content type does DNS lookups (both forward and reverse.) While performance testing I noticed that adding caching to the Logstash DNS filter actually reduced performance, contrary to expectations. With four filter worker threads, and the following configuration:

dns { 
  resolve => [ ...Continue reading

Elasticsearch London Meetup – Exploring the Graph API & SearchKit UI components

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Charlie Hull

This month's Elasticsearch Meetup was hosted by Argos at their Victoria Digital Hub with a relatively small crowd this time - I suspect quite a few who registered didn't actually turn up or release their tickets, which is a shame as there was a waiting list. Mark Harwood of Elastic was first with a talk about the new Graph API and visua...Continue reading

Elastic London User Group Meetup – scaling with Kafka and Cassandra

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Charlie Hull

The Elastic London User Group Meetup this week was slightly unusual in that the talks focussed not so much on Elasticsearch but rather on how to scale the systems around it using other technologies. First up was Paul Stack with an amusing description of how he had worked on scaling the logging infrastructure for a major restaurant booking website, to cope with hundreds ...Continue reading