We're very happy to announce our partnership with Confluent, which was founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, a stream data platform and the central component of their Confluent Platform. Flax has been aware of Kafka since its inception at LinkedIn, where it is used as the messaging backb...
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Powerful log capture, analysis and visualisation with open source software
The combination of Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (the ELK stack) can be used to build very powerful log analysis systems capable of handling thousands of events per second from multiple sources. We often use these technologies with Apache Kafka, a high-throughput, distributed, publish-subscribe messaging system originally developed at LinkedIn.
This combination of open source technologies can be used to ...
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We needed a new search engine to give our users better results when searching our catalogue of 250,000 products; we knew that Elasticsearch was the solution for us but complicated integrations into our site and internal systems meant an out-of-the-box installation would not suffice. Flax’s experience and expertise got us up and running quickly with a bespoke solution providing connections to our systems and a custom control panel for us to administer the system....
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Westcoast is the UK's largest privately owned IT distribution company and distributes leading IT & mobile brands to a broad range of resellers, retailers and office product dealers in the UK & Ireland. In the last 10 years Westcoast has expanded rapidly becoming the number 1 UK distributor for many of their vendors including HP, Toshiba, Samsung and many more. Westcoast’s revenues have seen a sharp increase over the decade with yearly r...
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We've been working on a number of projects recently involving open source software often quoted as 'Big Data' solutions - here's a quick overview of them.
The grandfather of them all of course is Apache Hadoop, now not so much a single project as an ecosystem including storage and processing for potentially huge amounts of data, spread across clusters of machines. Interestingly Hadoop was originally created by D...
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Back to the very impressive Bloomberg lecture theatre for this month's Lucene/Solr Meetup, with an good turnout (I'm guessing 60-70 people). Our first talk came from Diego Ceccarelli of Bloomberg on how his team have created a Solr implementation of Read more
Last night I dropped in on the Unified Log Meetup at JustEat's offices (of course, they provided lots of pizza for us all!). I've written about this Meetup before - as a rule the events cover logging and analytics at massive scale, with search being only part of the picture.
Joseph Francis from Read more
Highly scalable stored search and media monitoring with open source software
Flax builds high-performance media monitoring systems using our own open source library, Luwak. Simply put, it allows you to define a set of search queries and then monitor a stream of documents for any that might match these queries: a function also known as 'reverse search' and 'document routing'. Based on the powerful Apache Lucene library, it can be used to build monitoring and classification systems that ...
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Over the last 18 months we've been working closely with the European Bioinformatics Institute on a project to improve their use of open source search engines, funded by the BBSRC. The project was originally named BioSolr but has since grown to encompass Read more
