Elasticsearch 1.0 launched: An overview.
This is the day that everyone in the Elasticsearch community has been waiting for: Elasticsearch v1.0 has been officially launched and is available to download and use right now
Version 1 makes massive leaps forwards, and proves that Elasticsearch really does go beyond 'just search'. Elasticsearch has been production-ready for a long time now, but I'm sure the 1.0 milestone will help see even more widespread adoption.
What's new in Elasticsearch v1.0?
There are some other great new features available in v1. The long-awaited Snapshot and Restore API provides a simple way backing up your data by creating a snapshots of a individual indices or an entire cluster, and syncing this to a remote repository. I've written more about the Snapshot and Restore features here.
Secondly, If like me you manage large elasticsearch clusters, you will be happy to hear about the new cat API. These new endpoints allow sysads to manage their cluster from the command line without having to use non standard tools like jsawk to to parse json responses. A very welcome improvement!
1.0 has also seen the percolator functionality of Elasticsearch completely redesigned. If you are unfamiliar: Percolation is search reversed - instead of running a query to find matching docs, elasticsearch can percolate a document to find matching queries. Martijn Vangroningen wrote a detailed post about the new percolators over on the elasticsearch blog.
In my opinion the crowning gem of version 1 is the Aggregations Framework, which I recently wrote about. The Aggregations feature allows you to perform complex multi-level data aggregations at query-time, helping you to unearth the hidden insight within your data. It's a vast improvement upon the Facets API, and an absolute game-changer if you use elasticsearch for data analysis or insight. Check it out. Trust me.