Tidbits on software development, technology, and other geeky stuff

Tech Talk: Elasticsearch

At work, we do tech-talks every few weeks and this week I was asked to do a tech-talk on Elasticsearch.  I have been learning and using Elasticsearch to implement a 60 million document search solution over the last few months.  It has worked really well and has been a joy to use.  It’s been fun to work in a different domain for awhile and get a handle on the world of search.

Elasticsearch is an impressive search server packed full of features.  I initially evaluated a few of the search solutions out there, most notably Apache Solr, and decided upon Elasticsearch because of its ease of use and rock solid distributed architecture.  I love the REST JSON API, schema-less indexing and full document source retrieval ability.

As I’ve implemented Elasticsearch to support a new feature we are rolling out, I’ve already thought about other areas of our application that could take advantage of a search index; to take load off of our RDBMS and provide a performance boost to our stack.  Also, I see Elasticsearch as a fantastic way to handle Business Intelligence and Big Data concerns with tools like Kibana sitting on top of it.

Here is my slide deck from the tech-talk this week:

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