

Elasticsearch Raises $70 Million - asm89
http://www.elasticsearch.com/blog/press/elasticsearch-raises-70-million-series-c-financing/

======
jasonkolb
I'm sitting in Elasticsearch training right now (during a caffeine break).
These are some really great guys that know their stuff, and they're committed
to contributing back to the OSS version everything that makes sense. They
contribute a ton of code back to Lucene and employ a lot of the brightest
minds in this space.

On the product side, I'm sitting here being amazed at some of the problems
they've solved very elegantly. Elasticsearch has a bright future.

~~~
latj
How is it better than Solr?

I havent looked at Elastic Search in a long time, so I really do want to know.
Not trying to pick a fight. ;)

~~~
didip
* Kibana on ElasticSearch. This is huge. You get a polished Search & Graphing UI with very little effort.

* Much more approachable config.

* Its clustering is easier to setup.

* Eventhough logstash is a bit heavy for my taste, the whole ELK stack is really nice for aggregating server logs.

~~~
bbq
Agreed about logstash being too heavy for your app servers. It would be nice
to have the functionality in a trim, native binary.

As things are, one can always direct an app sever's syslog to a logging fleet
running logstash (or elasticsearch running embedded logstash):
[http://cookbook.logstash.net/recipes/rsyslog-
agent/](http://cookbook.logstash.net/recipes/rsyslog-agent/)

~~~
tveita
I think that's what Heka is supposed to be.

It looks pretty promising, but I have yet to meet anyone who uses it.

[https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2013/04/30/introducing-
hek...](https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2013/04/30/introducing-heka/)

~~~
bbq
Oh, that looks very nice. Neat to embed Lua as a sandboxed plugin environment.

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ig1
If people are curious as to why VCs are interested in open-source businesses:

[http://indexventures.com/news-room/blog/a-perfect-storm-
now-...](http://indexventures.com/news-room/blog/a-perfect-storm-now-is-the-
time-for-multibillion-dollar-open-source-companies)

~~~
michaelochurch
Open-source is becoming the only way to develop (and, _especially_ , maintain)
complex software. The fact that the engineers can gain employer-independent
reputations gives them an incentive that's astronomically expensive (as hedge
fund compensation goes) to replicate otherwise.

The world is finally figuring out that it's impossible to _employ_ top talent,
but that it can be quite lucrative to _sponsor_ it.

~~~
clubhi
It's not impossible to employ top talent. That is a very ignorant statement.

~~~
sheepmullet
Top talent has access to thousands of other well paying roles. You cannot
treat them the same way companies treat regular employees (badly). If you give
them pointless work, or work without career growth, they can up and leave in a
heartbeat. If you try and bully them or pressure them to work long hours or
place pointless restrictions (dress code, start times, vacation policy, etc)
on them they will leave.

~~~
clubhi
That is a statement I think most people on here would agree with. The original
statement wasn't. A company can be a joy to work for. You can also make some
really good cash.

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asm89
What I find interesting about the Elasticsearch story is the success it has
given that the core product (the search server) is completely open source.

~~~
hackerboos
My fear is that with money comes an 'Enterprise' edition.

~~~
SEJeff
I don't think the "open core" model is in their best interests. Look at a
company like Zenoss, where their OSS version is their biggest competitor. It
doesn't make sense for ES to do that.

Now marvel[1] is where they've started monetizing and I'm sure they make a
good bit of money from "professional services" teaching companies how to
deploy ES at scale. Hopefully they pull it off, as the world needs a good
competitor to splunk. ES has the backend tech, but kibana has a loooooong way
before it rivals the interface for searching splunk. Here's to hoping!

[1]
[http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/marvel/download/](http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/marvel/download/)

~~~
Argorak
Marvel is quite interesting. It is a product everyone _could_ build on their
own (basically, it is Kibana over their own metrics data), but at that price
point, there is no reasonable reason to do so.

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pyrox420
We love Elasticsearch. It's fast and accurate for huge amounts of data, super
easy to scale, and incredibly easy to get started. That cash can only make the
product better. Good for them!

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jack_jennings
Hopefully this means that the documentation gets some help, especially some of
the official libraries. So far working with ES has been a mixed bag… seems
good in theory but I've had a hard time getting over the learning curve.

~~~
spencera
Want to highlight some of your specific pain points?

~~~
jack_jennings
I guess I'm in the minority based on the other comments here…

After spending a few hours with the documentation, I felt like I had a
generally good feel for how you would interact with ES through curl, but then
jumping into using the Ruby library there seemed to be a big leap and I felt
like I needed to have a much more intimate knowledge of how ES worked to "get"
it. A lot of guess and check before I figured out how to query properly. I've
also been unsuccessful in figuring out how to implement accent folding. At
this point I assume that this has something to do with "mapping", but I
couldn't figure out where that was supposed to be set up (again, through the
Ruby lib, but I was also unsure where to start to just accomplish that via
curl…).

Who knows, maybe I just need to spend more time reading the docs, and maybe
the information that I need is in there somewhere, but to me it felt
incomplete or disorganized. I'd love to stop using Solr for document search,
but making ES do things that I know how to do in Solr ended up being too time
consuming.

I ended up feeling like I probably had to go to a training session to really
get it, which is a shame…

~~~
sujeetsr
I found the elasticsearch tutorials on youtube by Clinton Gormley pretty
helpful in understanding the concepts. Also came across this book (which I
haven't really read so I don't know how good it is, just posting it here)
[http://exploringelasticsearch.com/](http://exploringelasticsearch.com/)

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malux85
Elasticsearch is great. I have spent the last 6 months working on a project
using it as the primary search technology, it has been nothing but great. I
have not had any training and tried to figure it out through the online docs
(which in the last overhaul have gotten much better) so forgive me if any of
what I'm about to say is wrong, or better yet please correct me so I can learn
:)

here's the things I noticed when using it: \- Since it's schemaless by default
it will guess the data type of a document based on the first value it sees, as
far as I'm aware you're not able to change a data type later on, so I found it
best to create a schema (aka mapping) being explicit about the fields data
types up front. I think explicit is better anyway (Zen of python ;) )

\- It's blazingly fast. Like crazy quick.

\- Use the geo data type if you're going to be doing radius queries. I've got
50M documents in the index and it queries insanely fast. It's been just as
fast as PostGIS (which I also love)

\- Use this as the GUI: [http://mobz.github.io/elasticsearch-
head/](http://mobz.github.io/elasticsearch-head/)

\- Do some proper research on filtering before you start, start here:
[http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/referenc...](http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/analysis-
snowball-tokenfilter.html)

the correctly configured snowball filter will make sure things like
"rückwärts" will match "ruckwarts",

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enscr
Could someone explain in a few lines why & how is elasticsearch a
revolutionary thing (technically) ?

~~~
craigching
Do you need something beyond "highly scalable search solution"? A lot of
enterprises (and I'd guess startups too!) need good search solutions and your
two players in the Java space (that I know of) are Solr and Elasticsearch. We
are using Solr in our product, but the more I hear about Elasticsearch the
more I want to give it a serious try.

My reason for not using it originally was that we had prototyped our solution
using Compass (which was the project before Elasticsearch) only to have it
abandoned to work on Elasticsearch. So I was concerned about the "one dev"
model and losing something that was a key component of what we needed.

Since then I've not been impressed with SolrCloud (would love to hear good
experiences, but it seems their distributed model isn't right) and have been
giving Elasticsearch serious thought again.

~~~
michielvoo
"In the Java space" meaning deployed in a Java servlet container. Both are
stand-alone search servers, exposing their API for search and indexing through
HTTP using XML and/or JSON.

~~~
craigching
> "In the Java space" meaning deployed in a Java servlet container.

I didn't say nor mean to imply that. Technically, Solr _is_ based on servlet
technology whether stand-alone or not, you can choose to deploy it in a web
container of your choice or use the Jetty instance it comes with for the
"stand-alone" experience. I don't know much about Elasticsearch's architecture
personally.

~~~
Argorak
Elasticsearch is very component-based and can be deployed as a servlet if you
really wish.

Just use a different transport implementation:

[https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-transport-
war...](https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-transport-wares)

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grouma
I have been prototyping with Elasticsearch for the last couple of months. I
have nothing but great things to say about the software and documentation.
Several other partner teams have taken notice of my work and will likely
incorporate the software as well. Very exciting!

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arecurrence
Awesome! I make heavy use of elasticsearch and am very happy with the
performance.

It's typically the rest of the pipeline now that causes most of the latency
whereas search used to be the bulk of the duration of a request.

It has also spurred other entities to improve their search performance :)

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mooreds
I saw these folks at gluecon. Haven't looked at a ton of dashboard solutions,
but I found Kibana to be pretty compelling, simply because it was trivial to
get the elk stack up and running and input arbitrary data. I am not as
interested in log data, more in business metrics.

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edwintorok
I always thought that Elasticsearch was something provided by Amazon, and
hence not really interested in it. So I was rather surprised to see in the
title that they raised money.

Apparently what Amazon provides is called Elastic _MapReduce_ , not Elastic
_Search_.

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alexmorse
Maybe they can finally write some docs

~~~
room271
The docs are pretty good and have been for a while:

[http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/](http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/)

Admittedly they were pretty poor early on, but they've matured with the
product.

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gshakir
Great product and wish them best of luck. Had great success using with Hive
with their Apache Hadoop plugin for doing quick analysis.

