Elastic Cloud Enterprise 2.5 buds speciality nodes for better resilience

Elastic Cloud Enterprise 2.5 buds speciality nodes for better resilience

Elasticsearch-on-premises product Elastic Cloud Enterprise hits version 2.5, equipping users with dedicated coordinating nodes to better handle bulk indexing and search-heavy scenarios among other things.

The release comes a good half year after the last update, which mainly brought about a new command line interface and Elastic App Search, a service to help with the inclusion of purpose-tuned search options into apps. Instead of getting those to general availability level, the ECE team decided to concentrate on cluster resilience and getting some of the latest Elastic Stack improvements to local installations.

An example for this can be found in the added support for snapshot lifecycle management, which lets users set up policies “to automatically take snapshots and control how long they are retained”. New deployments will automatically use this mechanism instead of the formerly employed snapshotter, while ECE is meant to migrate old deployments should users upgrade their systems to a compatible version.

Speaking of migrating, Elastic has also added a wizard to facilitate the migration from index curation to index lifecycle management. Before, users only had documentation to guide them through the upgrade process necessary to get old deployments onto the new, apparently more robust approach. The addition comes just in time, since index curation is planned to be removed in the next major version of the Elastic Stack.

Probably the most interesting addition of v2.5 are the dedicated coordinating nodes that made their way into the release. Earlier versions already allowed devs to configure dedicated ingest layers. The new release however extends this functionality to also offer a way to set up layers in deployment templates that only coordinate read and write requests. Once enabled, this is meant to help free up data as well as master nodes, and improve a cluster’s resilience. 

However, users are advised to make sure they configured the layer to be big enough and highly available, since ECE will fall back on data nodes should coordinating ones not be available for some reason. This will make sure data can still be searched, but could also affect writes and prevent ingest pipelines from being executed.

Other enhancements include a step-by-step guide for adding custom Kibana plugins to stack packs, so that they can be repackaged and shared with other team members.