On the 22nd of November, Elastic had its biggest event in Amsterdam, where more than 800 Elastic stakeholders came together to watch and learn about the history and future of Elastic and its vision.
It was a priceless memory, I was able to share knowledge with others, and light-shining approaches as a roadmap. I was able to observe the usage of Elastic in different industries, listen to different scenarios, and experience the value that Elastic brings in terms of networking by attending my first ElasticON event.
The event started with an inspirational speech from Shay Banon, cofounder and the former CEO of Elastic. In his speech, he talked about the starting point and the evolution of Elastic. He also talked about the approach of Elastic as a solution in the first and coming 5 years.
During his talk about the future of Elastic, he talked about the new trends that will be added to Elastic as future solutions. Such as, working with time-series databases, and publishing a new query language and stateless architecture. These were just a couple of examples.
We were also able to listen to a model story, which would be possible for those who are thinking of a big migration from on-prem to ESaaS by Elastic experts from booking.com and SWIFT, and a customer fireside chat with Shay.
Vector Search & SIEM
After a lovely lunch in an authentic atmosphere, the event continued. There were different sessions at the same time for the visitors with different kinds of technical content.
We had an amazing session about vector search, which allows users to retrieve results based on the intent and contextual meaning of the search query, not just the keyword from Steve Dodson. Elastic represents this feature as a new era of the search engine, which is called semantic search. This works by converting data into vectors where distances represent similarity. All types of documents including images and audio files, and even searches are transforming into vectors. These vectors use machine learning to capture the meaning of unstructured data. Since the 8.0 release, Elastic has fully embraced support for vector search and NLP. We are looking forward to testing this intriguing new feature.
There was another memorable session by Senior Security Solutions Architect Marvin Ngoma from Elastic. He talked about the most invested subject in the IT world, security. The explanations were that Elastic wants to be a single-point solution within security with its own components, Unify SIEM, SOAR, XDR, endpoint, and cloud security. Marvin explained the requirements of the modern security world and what Elastic can offer and how they can make a difference from their point of view. Companies can manage their business in a multi-cloud environment with Elastic SIEM. He also mentioned new solutions of Elastic which are SOAR and threat intelligence (TI), which were a big weakness in previous versions.
Stateless Elastic Architecture
Last but clearly not least, I attended my last session which was represented by David
Brimley and Henning Andersen from Elastic. The session was about the future plans of Elastic being a stateless solution rather than stateful. They clarified the current need of the users, for example;
- How to use Elastic cost-effective,
- No hesitation about data size,
- Real-time insights to get value from data as fast as possible.
They talked about current users’ challenges like; cost and performance consumption from old data as new data, provisioning infrastructure for peak time usage, and data management challenges; like ingestion cost, redundant copies, and shared CPU for Ingest and Search.
They also declared how this new architecture of Serverless & Stateless Elastic will help to solve these user challenges with fully managed and version-less, K8s controlled, multi-tenancy Elastic service. Auto-healing and scaling will be the main concept of this service. At the end of the day, users will use Elastic with paying for what they use, without any size or region problem. This modern platform will be used for search, relevance, discovery, and anomaly detection for real-time insights
Conclusion
We ended the day with a networking session which provided us to come together and meet all the partners, tech enthusiasts, and people working for Elastic.
Thanks to all the partners, stakeholders, Elastic, and who else made that amazing day possible for everyone. It was a fantastic experience first-time experience. Looking forward to the next time!