Posted On: Dec 6, 2017
We are happy to announce the immediate availability of Elasticsearch 6.0 and Kibana 6.0 on Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Elasticsearch is a popular open source analytics and search engine for log analytics, full text search, application monitoring, and more. Amazon Elasticsearch Service delivers Elasticsearch’s easy-to-use APIs and real-time capabilities along with the availability, scalability, and security required by production workloads.
When creating an Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain, you can now select Elasticsearch version 6.0. All Amazon Elasticsearch Service domains using Elasticsearch 6.0 are bundled with Kibana 6.0, the corresponding version of the open-source visualization tool.
Elasticsearch 6.0 on Amazon Elasticsearch Service is powered by Apache Lucene 7.0.1 and offers several enhancements over the Elasticsearch 5.5 stack including:
- Improved efficiency of sparse fields: Doc-values provide powerful columnar data store capabilities, but previously, Elasticsearch reserved a storage slot for every field in every column. With this release, sparsely populated fields consume far less disk space and make more efficient use of file system caching.
- Reduced disk consumption: The “_all” field made it easy to get started with Elasticsearch by concatenating all values together, but it created a huge amount of duplicate data. The “_all” field is deprecated in Elasticsearch 6.0, which can significantly reduce disk usage.
- Index sorting and faster query times: You can now optimize Elasticsearch indexes to store documents on disk in a specific order, which can allow queries to be returned more efficiently.
- Better query resource management: A new control has been added to limit the maximum number of concurrent shard requests that can be served from a single search. This change intentionally slows down very broad searches and reduces their impact on other users.
- Kibana 6.0 accessibility improvements: Colors throughout Kibana have been redesigned to have appropriate contrast settings for users with color blindness.
- New experimental Kibana query language (Kuery): The default search feature in Kibana is a simple query string, which limits the application’s utility. Kuery is a new query language designed to simplify Kibana’s search experience and provide a foundation for powerful new features like named functions and scripted fields.
Elasticsearch 6.0 on Amazon Elasticsearch Service is now available in 14 regions globally: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) regions.
It’s easy to get started with Amazon Elasticsearch Service. For customers in the AWS Free Usage Tier, Amazon Elasticsearch Service provides free usage of up to 750 hours per month of a single-AZ t2.small.elasticsearch instance and 10 GB per month of optional EBS storage. Sign into the console to launch your Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain today.
