If you’re not the kind who looks under the hood, maybe you’ve never heard of Elastic.

It’s the world’s most popular search engine, according to the latest report by database ranker DB-engines.

NASA uses Elastic to sort and analyze all of the data generated by the Mars Rover.

Uber uses it in secret ways to help make sense of all of the data generated by drivers and riders.

Tinder uses it to help people build new connections.

Content Managers use it to support for complex search expressions: for full text search, stemming, geospatial search, distributed search for high scalability and more. Elastic has been downloaded by developers more than 50 million times, making it one of the most successful open source projects ever.

So it’s no wonder that nearly 2,000 developers from all over the world are gathered at the community’s annual conference, Elastic{ON}16, in San Francisco this week to learn about what goodness Elastic, the commercial entity behind open source projects Elasticseach, Logstash, Kibana, and Beats will bring them next.

In a world that’s literally teeming, streaming and obsessed with data, the possibilities are endless if the right technology can be harnessed.

Check Out the Stack

That's Elastic’s role. So it goes to follow that during the keynote today Elasticsearch creator and Elastic CTO Shay Banon introduced the Elastic Stack.

It’s an all-encompassing term for all of Elastic’s primary open source products (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) and a commitment that they will all be unified according to release version and on the same schedule. Until now, releases haven’t necessarily been synchronized or numbered in a harmonized way.

To deliver this, the team at Elastic had to burn a lot of midnight oil to get the Kibana 5, the unified user interface (UI) ready.

Based on user reactions, the community likes the result. “Users will now find it easier to start and deploy projects,” Jeff Yoshimura, vice president of worldwide marketing, Elastic, told CMSWire.

The download of the Elastic Stack is free, so if you’re looking for a way to ingest, search, analyze, visualize and explore content and other types of unstructured data, have at it.

Enterprise Grade

While free downloads are great, they’re mostly for experimenting, Enterprises tend to require more hardened products. This is the purpose of Elastic’s X-pack: it’s an extension to the Elastic Stack and offers:

Learning Opportunities

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  • Security: Authentication, login/session management, role-based access control, field/document-level security, encryption and IP filtering, audit logging
  • Alerting: Create nested and multi-level notifications, trigger push notifications, automated notifications to Slack, JIRA, HipChat, PagerDuty, and more
  • Monitoring: Real-time dashboard of cluster health, automatic collection of metrics such as index creation, search rate, shard activity, and latency
  • Graph: Automatically identify correlations and meaningful relationships across the data in Elasticsearch; drill down to find patterns, anomalies, etc.
  • Reporting: Generate, schedule and email dashboards as PDF reports to any user or group in your organization; collaborate across teams

Elastic in the Cloud

Elastic-as-a-Service, Elastic in the Cloud, whatever you want to call it, has been called Found until now. Cute name, but confusing, right?

Elastic thought so, too. So from here on out, Found is out. Elastic in the Cloud will simply be called Elastic Cloud. Users will have access to the capabilities of the enterprise-grade Elastic Stack and Xpack as well as support from the team that built Elastic Stack.

We’ve all met developers who want or need cloud capabilities but are limited to using what’s available on-prem.

Elastic users might not have to worry about that anymore. Elastic is in the process of introducing Elastic Cloud Enterprise. With it companies who have to manage tens or hundreds of clusters of the Elastic Stack, can use the same technology that Elastic uses to power the Elastic Cloud service.

Organizations with large deployments of Elasticsearch across multiple teams, divisions, and geographies can centralize and manage the hundreds of thousands of clusters with a single dashboard.

Key features include automated provisioning, centralized monitoring and management, automated scaling and resizing of clusters and nodes, one-click upgrades for patches and releases, data replication and more.

Based on the responses we’re seeing from ElasticON, developers are getting what they long for and both Elastic and the associated open source communities are providing the tools from which new, sometimes not yet imagined products and solutions can be built.

The any-way-you-want-it, anywhere-you-want-to-do-it model (aka “on- premises or in the cloud") is likely to pave the road to even greater adoption.

What’s not to love?