Azure fans can now get a full Elasticsearch service on the Microsoft-owned platform with the launch of a beta of the service with GA promised later this year.
Elastic said the move meant that “Organizations that have standardized on Azure will now be able to enjoy the convenience of a fully managed Elasticsearch service, from the creators of Elasticsearch, on their preferred cloud platform — something that was not previously possible. “
It added that many users were already using Elasticsearch on Azure, “often utilizing the ARM template for the Elastic Stack that was launched in collaboration several years ago.”
It added, “We support Microsoft technologies in other areas, such as our .NET clients, Winlogbeat for WindowsOS event collection, Azure Active Directory integration to secure Elasticsearch clusters and .NET support in our Elastic APM product.”
The service will initially be in beta, served up from two Azure regions — East US 2 in Virginia and West Europe in the Netherlands — and promises the full set of Elasticsearch Service features.
During the beta, Elastic said, “Elastic technical support is available.” It added, “Later in 2019, we intend to move the service to generally available and add mission-critical support service levels.”
Elastic already offers its search service on Google Cloud and AWS, so this week’s move arguably colours in most of the enterprise cloud map. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean all is hunky dory with all cloud providers. Earlier this year, AWS announced plans for an Open Distro for Elasticsearch, claiming Elastic’s approach was “muddying” the waters between community and proprietary code.