Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE), an Elastic offering suitable for on-premises as well as cloud deployment, has been made available in version 2.4, bringing customers app search and a new command line interface.

The latter is called ecctl and was developed by the team behind the regular Elastic Cloud to help them script or automate parts of their operations. ecctl makes use of the ECE API, but will also work with an upcoming public Elastic Cloud API. The project is still in its beta phase, but since its code is available on GitHub, you can help to fix any issue you might run into.

Another beta feature is the ability to add Elastic App Search to deployments. The service is meant to facilitate the inclusion of purpose-tuned search options into applications and can be added when walking through the “Create deployment” process.

To make the management of deployments easier, the Elastic team also added a new set of API endpoints. In previous versions, deployment components could only be manipulated individually, which tended to give customers headaches in upgrade scenarios. The new, “Deployment” prefixed endpoints change that by offering a way of treating deployments as a whole instead. Elastic Cloud Enterprise also allows admins to generate API keys, giving teams an option of modifying their deployments themselves.

ECE 2.4 comes with a new proxy layer that has been used in the Elasticsearch Service for the last couple of months. The new implementation is supposed to be more stable and fault tolerant, but should most importantly serve as the foundation for upcoming features such as cross-cluster replication.

Other new additions include the more on-premises focused workload distribution strategies “distribute first” and “distribute anti-affinity”. “Distribute first” tries to spread the deployment instances as evenly as possible across available resources, trying to create new ones on the most empty allocators. “Distribute anti-affinity” is similar but sets up new instances of the same deployment on separate allocators where possible, to keep the impact of failures low.

A complete list of changes for Elastic Cloud Enterprise 2.4 can be found in the product’s release notes.