Elastic
announced that Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes
(ECK) is moving out of beta and into general availability.
As Elastic announced with the alpha release of ECK back in May 2019,
the vision for ECK is to provide an official way to orchestrate
Elasticsearch on Kubernetes and provide a SaaS-like experience for
Elastic products on Kubernetes. Kubernetes has continued to grow in
popularity and has become the standard for orchestrating container
workloads, and Elastic has seen a growing number of users deploying the
Elastic Stack on Kubernetes. Elastic has already taken a number of steps
to support container workloads, such as releasing official Docker images for Elasticsearch and Kibana, joining the CNCF, and launching Elastic Helm charts. Bringing ECK into general availability is the exciting next step on this journey.
The
initial alpha release of ECK built on Elastic's years of operational
knowledge gained from creating Elasticsearch and Elastic Cloud
Enterprise and running the Elasticsearch Service. The community
reception to the first alpha release (and the three early access
releases that followed) has been extremely positive, and with the
general availability of ECK Elastic offers users a production-ready
solution to deploy and streamline the operation of the Elastic Stack on
Kubernetes.
Day 2 operations simplified
When
it comes to deploying software, day 1 is easy; day 2 is more
challenging. Built on the Kubernetes Operator pattern, ECK simplifies
many day 2 operations - such as scaling, upgrades, and configuration
management - when managing one or more deployments of the Elastic Stack
on Kubernetes. This reduced operational burden lets users focus on their
business requirements and reduces time to value from the Elastic Stack.
Notable features include:
- Deploy and manage multiple Elasticsearch clusters, including Kibana
- Seamless upgrades to new versions of the Elastic Stack
- Simple scaling that allows you to grow with your use cases
- Default security on every cluster
As
the creators of Elasticsearch and the rest of the Elastic Stack,
Elastic wants ECK to be the best solution for users looking to
orchestrate Elasticsearch on Kubernetes. Many users have validated this
during the alpha/beta cycles.
"As
an early adopter of both Kubernetes and Elastic, we've been excited
about testing Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) as it will allow us to
streamline our processes for building and operating Elasticsearch on
Kubernetes," said Michael Lorant, Principal Systems Engineer at Nine,
Australia's largest locally owned media company. "With the release of
ECK 1.0 GA, we are looking forward to getting the best features of the
Elastic Stack including the infrastructure UI that provides detailed
visibility of our Kubernetes environment. We are excited to explore
further usage of ECK and Elastic for Kubernetes as it aligns with our
strategy of complete application and cluster observability."
Curated solutions and exclusive features
ECK gives users the complete Elastic experience on Kubernetes,
including features and capabilities that you can only get from Elastic -
such as APM, Logs, Metrics, SIEM, Canvas, Lens, machine learning, and
index lifecycle management. All clusters deployed via ECK include these
capabilities. Support for advanced topologies through features like
dedicated master and machine learning nodes and hot-warm-cold
deployments lets users optimize their deployments further for
observability and security use cases.
Elastic
has released the core ECK functionality under the free-forever Basic
tier to make these exclusive features and capabilities available to all
users, no matter where they deploy Elastic products. Users can also
access more advanced features through Elastic's Enterprise Subscription.
Getting started
ECK
is built for flexibility and runs on a variety of Kubernetes platforms,
including Google Kubernetes Engine, Red Hat OpenShift, Azure Kubernetes
Service, Amazon Kubernetes Service, and vanilla Kubernetes.
It's
also super simple to get started. With a one-line command, you can
deploy ECK into your Kubernetes environment and start creating clusters
in a few minutes. For instructions and more details, be sure to check
out the ECK quickstart page.
Use the Elastic Stack to monitor Kubernetes
The
Elastic and Kubernetes story extends well beyond just running the
Elastic Stack on Kubernetes. The Elastic Stack can also be used to
provide comprehensive observability and security capabilities for
Kubernetes and its ecosystem:
What's next?
With
the release of ECK 1.0, users now have a strong foundation to start
deploying and managing the Elastic Stack on Kubernetes. Elastic will
continue to build richer experiences on top of ECK, such as a dedicated
UI, first-party API, autoscaling, and more.