• A near-real-time application for quickly indexing and searching 'documents'
• Horizontally scales using Nodes in Clusters to adapt to huge data loads
• Document content stored in an 'inverted index' to allow for hugely fast 'aggregations', 'filters', and other analytics operations
• In addition to the inverted index, it stores the _source data as a JSON object for fast recall - no 'hydration' required - you get the whole thing
• Lucene under the hood
• First built as a more approachable version of Lucene by Shay Bannon to search recipes
• Now a full-fledged company still focused on open source but also offering Enterprise Support

• REST for all the things (seriously)
• Use with any language because HTTP (Yay!)
• Dev kits for most languages (see Language Packs below)
• REALLY easy to get up and running (test use cases make it even easier)
• Use it most anywhere in the stack
• Really powerful and easy to extend / customize
• Open source from the start
• The Docs are pretty comprehensive

• Full text search
• Text analysis (grammar, root word, pluralization, etc)
• "More Like This" Term Frequency Analyzers
• Advanced Queries with operators (fuzzy search, etc)

• You know, for search!
• Logging (big use case)
• "Big Data" (or, pretty big data)
• Rapid filtering / counts / aggregation of data
• Supplement existing big data / activity logging (Kafka) applications
• Percolation / Alerting
• Data Visualization w/ Kibana

Python (High Level, Official): https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-dsl-py Python (Low Level, Official): https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch-py Go (Community): https://olivere.github.io/elastic/ Clojure your thing?: http://clojureelasticsearch.info/ Java: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/java-api/current/client.html JavaScript: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/client/javascript-api/current/index.html

• Starting is easy, maturing is hard
• A good deal of gotchas and lots of best practices - this is getting better with time but still will take some time to mature a solution
• Using the API is straightforward. Getting your data ready and thinking about structure is hard

Installation Instructions:

• Download your Apps (Elasticsearch + Kibana recommended, Logstash great for ingest): https://www.elastic.co/products

• Install the X-Pack if you'd like and/or want to see what is offered for Enterprise

• If you'd like to ingest your own data sets, use Logstash

• Because it's the season, we'll work with the FEC example that is handily provided by Elastic: https://github.com/elastic/examples/tree/master/ElasticStack_usfec

• I've done this for you already! Hooray! (INSERT GH URL)