Since you are reading this book, you probably already know what Elasticsearch is. For the sake of completeness, let's define Elasticsearch:
Elasticsearch is a real-time, distributed search and analytics engine that is horizontally scalable and capable of solving a wide variety of use cases. At the heart of the Elastic Stack, it centrally stores your data so you can discover the expected and uncover the unexpected.
Elasticsearch is at the core of the Elastic Stack, playing the central role of a search and analytics engine. Elasticsearch is built on a radically different technology, Apache Lucene. This fundamentally different technology in Elasticsearch sets it apart from traditional relational databases and other NoSQL solutions. Let's look at the key benefits of using Elasticsearch as your data store:
- Schemaless, document-oriented
- Searching
- Analytics
- Rich client library support and the REST API
- Easy to operate and easy to scale
- Near real-time
- Lightning-fast
- Fault-tolerant
Let's look at each benefit one by one.