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Multiple cloud deployments are starting to get traction as the king of the cloud, Amazon Web Services, starts getting more competition from Microsoft Azure, IBM and Google. Companies also are now beginning to shop around for the best deal for specific applications they are running in clouds that themselves have become more specialized.
One of those new-gen specialized clouds opened for business on May 31: Elastic. This is the company behind Elasticsearch, and the Elastic Stack, and it’s focused directly on enterprise development.
Elastic, itself built on a combination of open source and home-brewed technology, had amalgamated a collection of open source products that provide key business functions, such as search, logging and analytics. Now the company, which has bi-continental headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, on May 31 announced the general availability of Elastic Cloud Enterprise, which makes available all the tools it has on its virtual shelves plus a lot of other new functionality.
Elastic claims this new cloud enables organizations to centralize the management, monitoring and provisioning of multiple Elastic Stack clusters and deploy X-Pack features, such as security, alerting, monitoring, graph, reporting and machine learning.
Lots of Functionality Available
Users also can run Elasticsearch, Kibana, and X-Pack on physical hardware in a virtual environment, private cloud, in a private zone in a public cloud, or in a public cloud, such as–you guessed it–the aforementioned Google Cloud, Azure or AWS.
That’s a lot of functionality and a lot of choices. A key point to remember, however is this: ECE works specifically with Elastic Stack; it’s not for OpenStack, Spark or any other cloud operating system, although it does have connectors to other systems. In fact, you can run Elastic Cloud on another cloud, if you so desire.
“You can think of this as infrastructure that bundles our commercial features and is based on Elastic Cloud, which we brought to the market in 2015,” Vice-President of Worldwide Marketing Jeff Yoshimura told eWEEK. “That same (Elastic) cloud is running thousands of clusters today around the world—in virtual environments, in private zones on a public cloud, on physical hardware, wherever. We’ve made it so that organizations with multiple use cases can expand across organizations and manage it all in a central way.”
Elastic Cloud Enterprise gives users a single console and user interface to simplify provisioning, maintenance and resource management, Yoshimura said. It also provides security for every managed cluster and ensures compliance with automated processes, such as cluster management, upgrades and version control.
Key Features
Other features include:
- creating and deploy new Elastic Stack clusters;
- orchestrating all the features of Elasticsearch, Kibana, and X-Pack from a single console;
- scaling clusters up (or down) based on data volumes;
- turning on security features like authentication, role-based access control, and encryption;
- hosting multiple versions of the Elastic Stack;
- upgrading clusters to the latest versions via an intuitive admin interface;
- monitoring clusters and endpoints in a central dashboard;
- offering search/logging/monitoring/security-as-a-service internally; and
- establishing a Elastic Center of Excellence across engineering, architecture, devops, IT security, and compliance teams.
Elastic has recorded more than 100 million cumulative downloads of its many open-source features. The 5-year-old company is backed by Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and NEA with more than $100 million in funding. Elastic has a distributed workforce with more than 500 employees in 30 countries.
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