Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene for real-time search and data analysis.

What is Elasticsearch?

Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. It provides near real-time search capabilities and is commonly used for log analysis, full-text search, and business analytics.

Elasticsearch Concepts

Index: Collection of documents
Document: JSON data unit
Shard: Horizontal data partition
Replica: Shard copy for availability
Mapping: Schema definition
Query DSL: JSON-based query language

ELK Stack

Elasticsearch is commonly used with Logstash (data pipeline) and Kibana (visualization) as the ELK Stack for log management.

Common Misconceptions

"Elasticsearch is just for logs" - General-purpose search engine
"Elasticsearch replaces databases" - Complements, doesn't replace
"Elasticsearch is hard to operate" - Managed services available