Essentially, Elasticsearch is a search engine which is enterprise-grade yet open-source, while also being distributed in nature and easy to scale. The database has a very extensive API and delivers searches which are very fast, key for data discovery apps. It is a very popular search engine for enterprise use and organizations including the Guardian, Wikipedia and GitHub make use of Elasticsearch as their search engine.
Top features of Elasticsearch:
- Elasticsearch is incredibly scalable and can accommodate petabytes of date in any combination of structured or unstructured data
- Multi-tenancy setups are supported
- Search is fully scalable and yet also nearly real-time in nature
Developers enjoy the fact that Elasticsearch uses a restful API and that it is schema-free, yet document-orientated. Of course, the powerful full-text search abilities are a major benefit too. However Elasticsearch does not include support for multi-language and in rare cases throws up a Asplit-brainn problem.