In this chapter, we started by understanding the motivations of various search and analytics technologies other than relational databases and NoSQL stores. We looked at the strengths of Elasticsearch, which is at the heart of the Elastic Stack. We then looked at the rest of the components of the Elastic Stack and how they fit into the ecosystem. We also looked at real-world use cases of the Elastic Stack. We successfully downloaded and installed Elasticsearch and Kibana to begin the journey of learning about the Elastic Stack.

In the next chapter, we will understand the core concepts of Elasticsearch. We will learn about indexes, types, shards, datatypes, mappings, and other fundamentals. We will also interact with Elasticsearch by using Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations, and learn the basics of searching.