While Elasticsearch has been a big success across Amazon Web Search properties, with some 10 million downloads, the big data search engine currently doesn’t play that well with Elastic Cloud Compute. This is something that Amazon plans to change with a new version offering easier EC2 integration.
Elasticsearch is considered more friendly and useful than Amazon’s other CloudSearch tool when it comes to navigating big data and EC2 and S3 buckets. Based on Java, Elasticsearch uses tools like Logstash to analyse data and displays the results using the Kibana data visualisation suite. This flexible bundle can be used to easily find data among terabytes of the stuff, while the likes of CloudSearch need a few pre-formatting tricks to read JSON files or XML formatted data.
However, the implementation is not a quick fix, as Elasticsearch needs to be refreshed and refined to prevent memory problems and to limit data and bandwidth jams as it sucks down data into the search engine.
Once those issues are resolved, expect Elasticsearch for EC2 to be trialled in April, and made generally available after substantial testing to ensure that it is a product the market wants, will accept and that offers a valuable use case. It should hit major regions first, including South East Asia, to get a thorough testing, as there seems to be a lot of users keen to see such a development, and Amazon usually pushes for easier, faster ways for its users to work.
On the less complex side of Amazon, for those looking to manage their clouds, Amazon is expected to introduce its AWS Services Catalog soon – after being tested for a few months. This will help administrators catalogue all their AWS activity and should help put some sanity into the pricing of third party tools that do a similar job but with rather exorbitant fees.
Features of the new AWS Services Catalog include improved presentation, and customised views of the current applications, services and usage, plus the ability to apply policies and help IT manage costs. Further benefits will include improved levels of standardisation, and ways to better control and integrate with existing systems – all of which will sound like music to the ears of admins seeing AWS requests pop up like rabbits.
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