Hello, and welcome to the Elastic Cloud -- a suite of Elastic-powered, software as a
service offerings from Elastic, the creators of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats,
and Logstash. The Elasticsearch Service on the
Elastic Cloud is our hosted Elasticsearch and Kibana solution. It lets you
launch your deployments in just minutes and manage them from the convenience of
an intuitive user interface. Just tell us the size of your cluster, your preferred
cloud provider, and the deployment region, and we take care of the rest.
Getting started is super easy. Create a trial account and log into the Elastic
Cloud Console. When provisioning a new cluster, we start by giving it a name. You
can then choose between AWS, Azure, or GCP for your provider. Since I'm in
California, I'll stick with the US West region, but you can choose a region close
to you. Our Elasticsearch Service always gives you access to the latest version
of the open-source Elastic Stack. New versions of the stack and security
patches are available in the cloud the same day they're released in
downloadable distributions. Yet another advantage of using a hosted offering
from the creators of Elasticsearch. Upgrading your clusters is easy too. Just
select the new version and the rest is handled automatically in the background.
Elasticsearch Service offers several out-of-the-box deployment templates,
making it very easy for you to select the option that's right for your use
case and your workload. Each template selects the appropriate cloud hardware
configuration for different needs. For example, if I expected an analytics-heavy
use case with lots of aggregations that rely on RAM, I'd opt for the memory-optimized
template, but if I had a logging use case where I wanted powerful
hardware to do the ingestion and then wanted to move the data after ingest to
cheaper instances, and I'm willing to accept slower searches, the hot-warm
option fits the bill perfectly. But, let's just stick with the default I/O optimized
template. It's pretty versatile and it's a great option if you're just getting
started or don't quite know your needs yet. At this point we're done.
I mean, we're ready to launch our first deployment or we can choose to further
customize it if we wish. We can see the deployment architecture for our cluster
here. We have Elasticsearch instances in two zones for fault tolerance. Each
deployment includes a free one-gigabyte Kibana instance, a free one-gigabyte
machine learning node, and a free half-gigabyte APM node.
Now, because I'm using a trial account, these deployment options are locked to
specific selections, but if you want to remove those restrictions for, say, load
testing or performance testing, simply go to the account tab and enter your credit card
information at any time or just get in touch with us. But this screen shows just
how easy it is to add capacity or modify your settings.
I mean, adapting your setup is just a setting in a slider away all at zero
downtime. We can configure additional options here as well. For instance, we can
choose to add dedicated master nodes for larger deployments or enable the free
machine learning node here, to help with anomaly detection. We can tweak
additional options and install plugins such as phonetic analysis or a language-
specific stemming, but sticking with the defaults is just fine too. Just like that,
with a few easy clicks, we have an Elasticsearch cluster up and running
with replication and high availability.
All Elasticsearch Service deployments have security enabled by default.
During the initial spin-up, it generates a strong password for the Elastic user.
Make sure to save this in a secure place. It can be reset later, but it can't be
retrieved. So our deployments being provisioned so it'll just be a few minutes
here. In the meantime, I can track the progress on the provisioning steps if I
wish. Now that our deployments have been provisioned, I can jump right into Kibana
by going to the left-hand navigation here. Let's log in to the Kibana console
using the default Elastic user along with the generated password. If you're
just getting started, install one of the sample data sets that ship with Kibana.
It's a great way to learn your way around data exploration. The "Add Data"
tutorial of the Kibana homepage is a great next step. They provide
step-by-step instructions for streaming logs and metrics into your
deployment from a variety of common data sources like Apache logs, Kubernetes pods,
and a huge variety of databases, data stores, and web servers.
These are just of couple ways to get data into your new deployments. There's many
more. There are Beats, Elasticsearch APIs, Logstash, and much more. If you're just
getting started, check out the documentation for all the details. Now we
take the security of your data very seriously, so Elastic Cloud includes the
full power of the Elastic Stack security features to manage and secure access to
your data. You can control users, roles, and privileges all from the convenience
of the Kibana console with just a few clicks. Let's take advantage of the role-based
access control that's included with Elastic Cloud. I'm going to add a
new user and then we can wrap up our experience here. Now let's send our
deployments some data. We can send system metrics from my local machine to our
cluster using something called Metricbeat. I'll simply follow the instructions
for this installation. It's just running a few terminal commands and editing the
Metricbeat config file so it knows how to talk to our cluster.
When the process is completed, terminal window looks something like this. Click
"check data" to ensure the connection and you're good to go. Now, have metrics
data coming from my local machine, flowing into my Elasticsearch deployment. Plu,
with the modules, I also get the out-of-the-box dashboards. I mean, modules
are great because they let you go from data to dashboards in just a few minutes,
so now I can visualize away in Kibana. This is the simplicity of our
Elasticsearch Service. We do the hard work so that you can focus on delivering
what matters. The Elasticsearch Service from Elastic. Nobody hosts the Elastic
Stack better. Why not sign up for a free trial today and get in touch with us if
you need your 14-day trial extended.