I was lucky enough to attend the London ElasticSearch User Group’s Meetup last night – around 130 people came to the Goldman Sachs offices in Fleet Street with many more on the waiting list. It signifies quite how much interest there is in ElasticSearch these days and the event didn’t disappoint, with some fascinating talks.
Hugo Pickford-Wardle from Rely Consultancy kicked off with a discussion about how ElasticSearch allows for rapid ‘hard prototyping’ – a way to very quickly test the feasibility of a business idea, and/or to demonstrate previously impossible functionality using open source software. His talk focussed on how a search engine can help to surface content from previously unconnected and inaccessible ‘data islands’ and can help promote re-use and repurposing of the data, and can lead clients to understand the value of committing to funding further development. Examples included a new search over planning applications for Westminster City Council. Interestingly, Hugo mentioned that during one project ElasticSearch was found to be 10 times faster than the closed source (and very expensive) Autonomy IDOL search engine.
Next was Indy Tharmakumar from our hosts Goldman Sachs, showing how his team have built powerful support systems using ElasticSearch to index log data. Using 32 1 core CPU instances the system they have built can store 1.2 billion log lines with a throughput up to 40,000 messages a second (the systems monitored produce 5TB of log data every day). Log data is queued up in Redis, distributed to many Logstash processes, indexed by Elasticsearch with a Kibana front end. They learned that Logstash can be particularly CPU intensive but Elasticsearch itself scales extremely well. Future plans include considering Apache Kafka as a data backbone.
The third presentation was by Clinton Gormley of ElasticSearch, talking about the new cross field matching features that allow term frequencies to be summed across several fields, preventing certain cases where traditional matching techniques based on Lucene‘s TF/IDF ranking model can produce some unexpected behaviour. Most interesting for me was seeing Marvel, a new product from ElasticSearch (the company), containing the Sense developer console allowing for on-the-fly experimentation. I believe this started as a Chrome plugin.
The last talk, by Mark Harwood, again from ElasticSearch, was the most interesting for me. Mark demonstrated how to use a new feature (planned for the 1.1 release, or possibly later), an Aggregator for significant terms. This allows one to spot anomalies in a data set – ‘uncommon common’ occurrences as Mark described it. His prototype showed a way to visualise UK crime data using Google Earth, identifying areas of the country where certain crimes are most reported – examples including bike theft here in Cambridge (which we’re sadly aware of!). Mark’s Twitter account has some further information and pictures. This kind of technique allows for very powerful analytics capabilities to be built using Elasticsearch to spot anomalies such as compromised credit cards and to use visualisation to further identify the guilty party, for example a hacked online merchant. As Mark said, it’s important to remember that the underlying Lucene search library counts everything – and we can use those counts in some very interesting ways.
UPDATE Mark has posted some code from his demo here.
The evening closed with networking, pizza and beer with a great view over the City – thanks to Yann Cluchey for organising the event. We have our own Cambridge Search Meetup next week and we’re also featuring ElasticSearch, as does the London Search Meetup a few weeks later – hope to see you there!
