Elastic has stretched its arms around Kubernetes by launching an Operator for the orchestration platform, and simultaneously making its core security features free.

The search firm described Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) as an “orchestration product based on the Kubernetes Operator pattern that lets users provision, manage, and operate Elasticsearch clusters on Kubernetes.”

Once installed into a Kubernetes cluster, ECK should simplify the deployment of Elasticsearch and Kibana on Kubernetes, “streamlining all those critical operations” such as managing and monitoring clusters, scaling capacity and local storage and scheduling backups.

At the same time, Elasticsearch promised, it will provide a “SaaS-like experience for Elastic products and solutions on Kubernetes.”

Talking of which, the paid Enterprise version will include additional features, including “the ability to deploy clusters with advanced features such as field- and document-level access control, machine learning, graph analytics, and more”. Additional advanced features are promised in the future, as is support for flavours of Kubernetes other than the initial selection of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and vanilla Kubernetes version 1.11 and above.

Talking of paid features, Elastic has also declared that the Elastic Stack’s core security features are now free. These include TLS for encrypted comms, file and native realm for managing users, and role-based access control.

“Security is an integral part of cluster operations, especially in shared and multi-tenant environments like Kubernetes,” Elastic said. “By moving the core security features into the default distribution of Elastic Stack, we can ensure that all clusters launched and managed by ECK are secured by default at creation time, without any additional burden on the admins.”

These had previously only been available to the vendor’s Gold subscribers.  A range of “advanced security features” are still only available in the Gold and above tiers, including LDAP and Active Directory Authentication, while Single Sign-on Authentication is only available to Platinum customers.

To gain access to the security features, you will need to upgrade to versions 6.8 or 7.1 of the Elastic Stack. No other features are affected or added with these versions.