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elastic
elasticsearch
Java2010–2024
elastic / elasticsearch

elasticsearch

Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine

Systems & InfrastructureSearch & Information Retrieval
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
74Distinct people
88Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
78.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Free and Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine

GitHub

Where it is used

  • GitHub — GitHub uses Elasticsearch to power its search services as the core search engine. Source
  • anyone — “Anyone.com, a global AI-powered real estate platform, replaced a Postgres search back end it had outgrown with Elasticsearch, moving 210 million production records onto a single index in about a week and a half and consolidating its entire search infrastructure into three lines of Terraform.” Source
  • 1 more documented example

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 11:34:28 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year88 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2010-07-20 20:38:02 UTC to 2024-10-29 14:01:46 UTC.

0510152010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20102011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 2 submissions, 6 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 15 mentions; 1 submissions, 14 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 14 mentions; 0 submissions, 14 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20102010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC826
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC15114
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC14014
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110

What Hacker News says

15 sources
jillesvangurp·Oct 12, 2019
They've long addressed all of that. There are helpful x-pack tags on the documentation for features that aren't in the OSS release. Check here for example on the documentation page for index life cycle management: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr... The pricing model for their platinum features is indeed opaque (as in most small companies can't afford this, and you'd have to talk to a sales rep to find out). Those features are also clearly marked. X-pack features are free to use. Also, if you try to use these features without the proper license key, it won't work for obvious reasons. There's zero risk of using this accidentally without first agreeing to some license. As for the repo, if you bother to open: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE..., it spells it out in 10 lines of text. The
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y've iterated on this a bit but this was always the place where they clearly outlined what is what. Also, each single source file includes details on how it is licensed. There's zero chance of a developer not seeing that if they are preparing some code patch. This is intentional; it's not optional to document stuff like this if you are serious about enforcing your copyright; which of course they are. Sysadmins pulling elasticsearch from a linux distro repo of course happens. Presumably they'd be getting an OSS build and not bundle proprietary components because they tend to care about not shipping proprietary code. If you go to the Elastic download pages, there are convenient links to both.
In AWS Elasticsearch: a fundamentally-flawed offering
ignoramous·Sep 19, 2019
I spent time frequently mucking with the elasticsearch codebase from 5.x through till 6.4 strictly from durability and resiliency PoV [0]. The improvements it is seeing in 7.x are tremendous. It still had the occasional tendency to go hay-wire and show behaviour that simply didn't make sense and couldn't be recovered from, but I'm confident 7.x will push it to making it even more resilient than 5.x+ [1]. The sheer number of configurable options for the cluster bringup, index setup, plugable components turns it into a very hard to tame beast. There is an opportunity here somewhere for someone to make Elasticsearch on Rails (convention over configuration). With 7.x, I feel the time is just abt right to try something like that. What excites me most abt 7.x is the overhaul of underlying distributed engine that's been going on for over 2yrs [2
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] that will enable a whole slew of super nice features [3] that'd put it on par with state-of-the-art distributed databases in terms of not only features but resiliency. [0] https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/resiliency/cur... [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/pacific... [2] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/10708 [3] https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-sequence-ids-6-0
In Using TLA+ for fun and profit in the development of ElasticSearch [video]
jillesvangurp·May 21, 2019
After 1 google search: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr... It includes a deep link straight into their repository right at the top: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/tree/7.1/distributi... In short, their Docker build process is part of the elasticsearch repository. So, it's actually part of their normal build process and not something that happens with a separate build in some different repository. Personally, I think this is a good practice. That's for both the OSS and non OSS images. They produce these with every build. And they probably test them too, which I think is the responsible thing to do and something I'd expect from them. They use gradle to build their docker images from a Docker file (https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/7.1/distributi...) that essentially untars the tar ball produ
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ced by their build. This looks pretty straightforward and free of magic steps. So, read the source. It's all there. You can build from source or do your own thing. A variant of their Docker file where you just wget their tar ball shouldn't be that hard to do.
In Security for Elasticsearch is now free
toast0·Apr 23, 2019
If you can recollect more details, I would love to know what happeend, but I'm not sure about 3) I'm not aware of a pipelining-unsupported error in http (it is a thing in SMTP). It would take a very special HTTP server to look for another request in the socketbuffer after the current one and respond with failure. On the other hand, a quick search found evidence of some very special HTTP servers doing bizarre things with HTTP: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/2665
In Why Turning on HTTP/2 Was a Mistake
kemitchell·Mar 13, 2019
If you contribute code to a project under Apache 2.0 terms, or a CLA without any copyright assignment, how can a company license it "exclusively ... under their proprietary license"? You mentioned subjecting an entire project that uses Elastic proprietary code to their proprietary license. Are you confusing source-available terms for copyleft terms? The licensing situation for Elastic work is far less nebulous than for much other open source, both legally, and in public notices. See: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE... Way easier to look at than the nightmare that is 100-character SPDX license expressions for distribution packages.
In Open Source Needs Open Source Companies
sheetjs·Mar 13, 2019
The entire crux of the post's commentary is an intentional misinterpretation of the original post. The motivating quote with the actual context is: > At AWS, we believe that maintainers of an open source project have a responsibility to ensure that the primary open source distribution remains open and free of proprietary code so that the community can build on the project freely Amazon's core complaint is: > Unfortunately, since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base. The Elastic license itself professes to include code that isn't covered under the original Apache 2.0 license: https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE... > Within the "x-pack" folder, source code in a given file is licensed under the > Elastic License, unless otherwise noted at the beginning of the
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file or a > LICENSE file present in the directory subtree declares a separate license. If Elastic wants to adopt an open core model, that's perfectly fine, but mixing the open source and proprietary bits in the same repo is messy and should raise eyebrows. What Amazon seems to be asserting is that a project that is open source shouldn't change the license terms. That is not an assertion, as this blog post claims, that the original developers must maintain the project indefinitely.
In Open Source Needs Open Source Companies
ignoramous·Mar 12, 2019
> When companies came to us, seeing our success, and asked for special working relationship in order to collaborate on code, demanding preferential treatment that would place them above our users, we told them no. I think this may have been the crux of the friction between the companies. Elastic sure looks to have collaborated with GCP [0][1], if not other enterprises. > Our answer has always been a constant: send a pull request, like everybody else does. The quality will speak for itself. I look around and spot at least three substantial bug/fixes from AWS employees (?) [2][3][4], so I don't see any lack of effort from AWS? AWS engs were sending pull requests, just like the others. That said, any sort of heavy handedness from maintainers of elasticsearch might also play a role in forcing enterprises to take control of software they depen
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d upon so much where legally allowed. We have seen this happen with Node.js/IO.js and MariaDB/MySQL before. > The FUD mostly comes from large(r) companies that fear what such a movement can cause. The irony of this statement is not lost on me. Elastic is that larger company (one that crucially controls a majority of the ecosystem around elasticsearch: kibana, logstash, beats, xpack to name a few), and AWS is an upstart here with their investment in open-distro, presumably to fight FUD. > We all sometimes need to self reflect on what and why we did that made us successful, to make sure we stay true to our course. [..] to others out there, that face so many reasons to be distracted, keep your focus [..] And last, to express our shared commitment to continue to build great products [..] It is our true north. I think one right way for Elastic to show commitment to opensource would be to entrust the projects to a community agreed governance model, like others before them have done [5][6][7][8]. Also, what's interesting is that its not just Amazon here, but Expedia and Netflix as well putting their weight behind open-distro [9]. Like someone pointed out, this response from Elastic does seem to be emotionally charged [10]. --- [0] https://www.elastic.co/about/partners/google-cloud-platform [1] blog.google "With the Elastic partnership in place, we’re kicking off our joint engineering work and will start rolling out managed Elasticsearch on GCP later this year." https://www.blog.google/products/google-cloud/google-cloud-p... [2] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/pull/27628/files [3] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/31479 [4] https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/issues/29531 [5] GridGrain and https://ignite.apache.org [6] Various networking companies and http://opennetworking.org [7] Cloudera and https://impala.apache.org [8] LinkedIn/Confluent and https://kafka.apache.org/ [9] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-... [10] "It is always Day 0 at Elastic (like the developers we serve, we use zero based numbering)."
In On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
jillesvangurp·Mar 12, 2019
This he said, she said style debate is indeed unproductive. If I read this correctly, Amazon tried to get a special deal from Elastic basically in order to produce a competing service. Elastic declined to cooperate and now Amazon is exercising their rights under the Apache license. So, far so good. It's the provocative website that makes it seem like there's some huge conspiracy by Elastic that provoked Shay Banon's response. And not the fact that Amazon are doing what they are doing (i.e. redistribute the OSS parts of Elasticsearch), Elastic seems to have little problems with this because their license allows this and as Shay points out others have done this as well. Amazon's complaints boil down to two things: 1) Elastic distributes a version of their software that includes non OSS components. You don't have to use these but you can. Ac
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tually Elastic offers rpms containing only the apache licensed components on their download page: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/curr.... So this is maybe a bit less true than Amazon is portraying here. This would be what you'd install on a server if you are self hosting. Likewise there are OSS docker images from Elastic. They also have oss docker images. Elastic does this because up-selling this stuff is how they make money. Amazon's beef seems to be that it would be awfully nice for them if they could offer an alternate distribution more prominently without all this stuff so that they give that to their own customers. 2) Their repository contains some well documented directories that contain non Apache licensed source code for these components. As far as I know this is pretty well documented and if you are modifying files in a directory, presumably you know what you are doing. This is because they want to develop most of this stuff in the open and be able to accept pull requests against both their OSS and non OSS stuff. This seems pragmatic and preferable to producing binary distributions with some components from private repositories. For reference, here's the text of the license file (https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/master/LICENSE...): "Source code in this repository is variously licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0, an Apache compatible license, or the Elastic License. Outside of the "x-pack" folder, source code in a given file is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0, unless otherwise noted at the beginning of the file or a LICENSE file present in the directory subtree declares a separate license. Within the "x-pack" folder, source code in a given file is licensed under the Elastic License, unless otherwise noted at the beginning of the file or a LICENSE file present in the directory subtree declares a separate license. The build produces two sets of binaries - one set that falls under the Elastic License and another set that falls under Apache License Version 2.0. The binaries that contain `-oss` in the artifact name are licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0." So, you might not agree with this arrangement but you can get or build pure OSS quite easily and many people do. And it is hard to argue against Apache 2.x here. The license pretty much makes it obvious how stuff is licensed. This is unsurprising. Any confusion here would be a legal bug; this stuff needs to be unambiguous and it seems to be. BTW. I think it is great that Amazon is providing their own distribution for their customers. It would be awfully nice though if they'd update it to the current version and not ship already fixed bugs. They have a history of doing this with Elasticsearch; probably because they are not on speaking terms with Elastic apparently. Contrary to the popular belief, this is not a fork. It's a binary distribution. Probably really convenient if you use their hosted version. Otherwise, get the latest and greatest from upstream. Also refer to the Elastic website for documentation because Amazon does not bother with this either. And go to their discussion forums and stackoverflow for free support and options for getting payed support, etc. Once you figure out that they are not doing a half bad job of that, go check out elastic cloud and use that. It's easier, better, faster, and cheaper and you can get it with AWS billing. Or if you prefer on other clouds or your own cloud. And yes, I have used both elastic cloud, aws elasticsearch and have done self hosting as well.
In On “Open” Distros, Open Source, and Building a Company
praseodym·Mar 11, 2019
They have open sourced it (https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/tree/master/x-pack/...), but you cannot (legally) use it without a paid subscription. Same goes for PDF and PNG reports in Kibana. Monitoring is available in the free subscription, which cannot be used by SaaS providers. And now that we have an alternative: the Elastic monitoring plugin is pretty neat, but the Open Distro Performance Analyzer looks way more powerful. I’ve had the Elastic monitoring UI and a regular ‘perf top’ open with still no clue as to why Elasticsearch was eating CPU (relative to the query load). It looks like Performance Analyzer brings far more to the table.
In Open Distro for Elasticsearch
praseodym·Mar 11, 2019
Last year Elastic opened up the source code of their commercial X-Pack offering: https://www.elastic.co/blog/doubling-down-on-open. This means that these components (security, alerting, etc.) are now available in the GitHub repository, but they are covered by the proprietary Elastic license instead of the Apache 2.0 license like the rest of the software. Some of the proprietary parts can be used for free, some need a paid commercial subscription. None of them are true open source (free as in freedom), though. However, this is also when Elastic started muddying the waters (to quote the AWS blog post). Most of the new features across the Elastic stack that were added in the past couple of months (Index Lifecycle Management, APM UI, Infrastructure and Logs UI, Kibana multi-tenancy, Kibana Canvas) are not added to the Apache 2.0 codebase but
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are only available in the free-but-not-open version. These features can be used for free with the Basic subscription (no registration needed) but only under the terms of the Elastic license. And this Elastic license is where AWS feels the pain. It clearly prohibits SaaS offerings: > You agree not to: [..] use Elastic Software Object Code for providing time-sharing services, any software-as-a-service, service bureau services or as part of an application services provider or other service offering (collectively, "SaaS Offering") [..] (from https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch/blob/6.6/licenses/E...) The license is very similar to moves that MongoDB and Redis made recently. Only Elastic is just now doubling down on adding new (and highly demanded) features to their proprietary offering.
In Open Distro for Elasticsearch

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