Elastic{ON} 2016

Last week a colleague and I attended Elastic{ON} in San Francisco. The venue at Pier 48 gave a nice view on (among others) the Oakland Bay Bridge. Almost 2000 Elastic fanatics converged to listen to and talk about everything in the Elastic Stack.

I have been to a lot of sessions. I think the two most important things that I will take home are “5.0” and “graphs”.

5.0

The next version of the Elastic Stack will be 5.0. This means that all main Elastic products (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana and Beats) are having the same version number in all following release bonanzas. This will be easier for all customers and clients.

I mentioned the Elastic Stack. This is a little rebranding of the ELK Stack plus Beats. More rebranding is the renaming of the Elastic as a Service solution Found to Elastic Cloud. I think those are simple but good changes.

Also Elastic created the concept of packs to combine extensions. Most notably the X-Pack will all the monitoring, alerting and security (and more) goodies wrapped together.

More about 5.0 on the Elastic blog.

Graphs

The other main take-away are the graph capabilities (Graph API) that will be added to Elasticsearch (through the X-Pack). It is still in an early phase but it looks awesome! It looks very easy to use and it is very fast. The UI is written as a Kibana plugin.

Actually there will be some more Kibana plugins. Managing users and roles via the Security API, for example.

Talks

Off course there were a lot of talks. Common subjects were security and recommendation. Graphs could play an important role there!

Some talks were cool user stories of companies that implemented (parts of) the Elastic Stack. Other talks dove deep into the different Elastic products. Some of those turned out to be a little out of my league. For example the math behind the new default BM25 scoring algorithm.

The talks will be put online in the next couple of weeks. So be sure to check them out! Maybe I will see you next year!