Elastic{ON} 2017 draws 2200 participants to Pier 48 during these somewhat chilly San Francisco days in March. It’s a 40% increase from the 1600 or so participants last year, in line with the growing interest for the Elastic Stack and the successes of Elastic commercially.
From Findwise – we are a team of 4 Findwizards, networking, learning and reporting.
Shay Banon, the creator of Elasticsearch and Elastic CTO, is doing both the opening and closing keynote. It is apparent that the transition of the CEO role from Steven Schuurman has already started.
2016 in retrospective with the future in mind
Elastic reached 100 million downloads in 2016, and have managed to land approximately 4000 paying subscription customers out of this installed base to date. A lot of presentations during the conference is centered around new functionality that is developed and will be released to the open source community freely. Other functionality goes into the commercial X-pack subscriptions. Some X-pack functionality is available freely under the Basic subscription level that only requires registration.
Most presentations are centered around search powered analytics, and fewer around regular free text search. Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack got its main use cases within logging, analytics and in various applications as a data platform or middle-layer with search use-cases as a strong sidekick.
A strong focus on analytics
There’s 22 sponsors at the event, and most of the companies are either offering cloud based monitoring or machine learning services. IBM, the platinum sponsor, are promoting the Bluemix cloud services for cognitive Watson functionality and uses the conference to reach out to the predominantly developer-focused audience.
Prelert was acquired in September last year, and is now being integrated into the Elastic Stack as the Machine Learning component and is used for unsupervised anomaly detection to give operation log insights. Together with the new modular Beats architecture and various Kibana improvements, it looks apparent that Elastic is chasing the huge market Splunk currently controls within logging and analytics.
Elasticsearch SQL – giving BI what it needs
Elasticsearch SQL will give the search engine SQL capability just like Solr got with their parallel SQL interface. Elasticsearch is becoming more and more a “data platform”. Increasingly becomming an competitor to HPE Vertica and Amazon RedShift as it hits a sweet spot use-case where a combination of faster data loading and extreme scalability is needed, and it is acceptable with the tradeoffs of limited functionality (such as the lack of JOIN operations). With SQL support the platform can use existing visualization tools such as Tableu and it expands the user base as many people in the Business Intelligence sector knows SQL by heart.
Fast and simple Beats is music to our ears
Beats will become modular in the next release, and more beats modules will be created either by Elastic or in the open source or commercial community. This increases simple connectivity to various data sources, and adds standardized dashboards for the data source, which will increase simplicity and speed in implementation.
Heartbeat is a new Beat (with a beautiful name!) that send pings to check that services are alive and functioning.
Kibana goes international
Kibana is maturing with some new key updates coming soon. A Time series visual builder that will give graphical guidance on how to build the dashboards, Kibana Canvas gives custom dynamic reports and enables slide show presentations with live data, and the GUI frontend is translated to various languages.
There’s a new tile service for maps, so instead of relying on external map services, Elastic now got control over the maps functionality. The service can be used free of charge but requires registration (Basic subscription) to use all 18 zoom levels.
To conclude, we’ve had three good days with exciting product news and lots of interesting meetings in what could very well be the biggest show for search and search-driven analytics right now! Be sure to see us at the next year’s Elastic{ON} again. If not before, see you then!
From San Francisco with love,
/Andreas, Christian, Joar and Peter