I’ve always been careful to distinguish between Elasticsearch (the open source search server based on Lucene) and Elasticsearch (the company formed by the authors of the former) and it seems someone was listening, as the latter has now rebranded as simply Elastic. This was one of the big announcements during their first conference, the other being that after acquiring Norwegian company Found they are now offering a fully hosted Elasticsearch-as-a-service (congratulations to Alex and others at Found!). As Ben Kepes of Forbes writes, this may be something to do with ‘managing tensions within the ecosystem’ (I’ve written previously on how this ecosystem is expanding to include closed-source commercial products, which may make open source enthusiasts nervous) but it’s also an attempt to move away from ‘search’ into a wider area encompassing the buzzwords-de-jour of Big Data Analytics.
In any case, it’s clear that Elastic (the company, and that’s hopefully the last time I’ll have to write this!) have a clear strategy for the future – to provide many different commercial options for Elasticsearch and its related projects for as many different use cases as possible. Of course, you can still take the open source route, which we’re helping several clients with at present – I hope to be able to present a case study on this very soon.
Meanwhile, Martin White has identified how a recent book on Elasticsearch describes literally hundreds of features and that ‘The skill lies in knowing which to implement given the nature of the content and the type of query that will be used’ – effective search, as ever, remains a difficult thing to get right, no matter what technology option you choose.
UPDATE: It seems that www.elasticsearch.org, the website for the open source project, is now redirecting to the commercial company website…there is now a new Github page for open source code at https://github.com/elastic
Unfortunately I also see directions going into not-so-clear separation between company and Elasticsearch.
If you type in http://www.elasticsearch.org or any other bookmark to the former opensource project, you now land on elastic.co – I don’t think this is a good idea. If they would clearly separate between company and software, they should keep the downloads, guide,… available on elasticsearch.org (and there only Elasticsearch, not logstash,…) and only provide the commercial support on elastic.co.
I am afraid what’s coming!