What is Elasticsearch?
Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of addressing a growing number of use cases. As the heart of the Elastic Stack, it centrally stores your data for lightning fast search, fine‑tuned relevancy, and powerful analytics that scale with ease. Built on Apache Lucene, Elasticsearch provides real-time search and analytics for all types of data.
Key Features
- Full-Text Search: Advanced text search capabilities with relevance scoring
- Real-Time Analytics: Analyze data as it's indexed
- Distributed Architecture: Horizontal scaling across multiple nodes
- RESTful API: Simple HTTP-based API for all operations
- Schema-Free: Dynamic mapping for flexible data structures
- Multi-Tenancy: Support for multiple indices and types
Basic Search Query
GET /products/_search
{
"query": {
"match": {
"title": "smartphone"
}
},
"size": 10,
"from": 0
}
Aggregation Example
GET /sales/_search
{
"size": 0,
"aggs": {
"sales_per_month": {
"date_histogram": {
"field": "date",
"calendar_interval": "month"
}
}
}
}
Career Impact
Elasticsearch skills are highly sought after in the big data and search domains. Companies like Netflix, GitHub, and Stack Overflow rely on Elasticsearch for their search infrastructure. Professionals with Elasticsearch expertise command premium salaries in data engineering and backend development roles.
Learning Path
- Learn JSON and RESTful API concepts
- Understand search and indexing fundamentals
- Master Elasticsearch query DSL
- Practice with aggregations and analytics
- Learn cluster management and scaling
- Explore the Elastic Stack (Kibana, Logstash, Beats)