Elasticsearch twangs out Elastic App Search beta

Elasticsearch is a Java-developed ‘application search’ engine based on the Lucene library, it is open sourced under the Apache License

It provides a distributed, multi-tenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents.

Elasticsearch developers David Harsha, Marshall Scorcio, Brian McGue, Kellen Evan have come together to note that Elasticsearch has now been downloaded over 350,000,000 times.

So we know Elasticsearch then, that’s for searching, logging and data storing at the infrastructure level.

Elastic App Search is also for search, and it is built on and on top of Elasticsearch.

Elasticsearch of course seldom exposed to the public Internet.

The team explains that to allow public access to Elasticsearch data, developers mights put it behind a proxy server, or wrap its APIs in existing middleware.

Programmers would then also need to ponder what to expose, keep it secure, manage authentication for… and when and where to write ‘insulating logic’ to allow clients to reach your data.

“If you just want to provide search within your application — to index your data, then construct an application or product from it — you will be most interested in Elastic App Search. It is the intelligent, optimised, API wrapper in front of Elasticsearch,” notes the team.

During the beta period, developers can spin Elastic App Search up on their own hardware at no charge. To do so, download App Search.

This self-managed release of Elastic App Search requires that you have Java 8 installed and Elasticsearch 6.4+ running.