DevRel newsletter — March 2025

Hello from the Elastic DevRel team! In this newsletter, we cover the first pre-release of Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack 9.0, the availability of Elastic Cloud Serverless on Azure, the latest blogs and videos, and upcoming events, including ElasticONs in Sydney and Singapore.

The first 9.0 pre-release, 9.0.0-beta1, of Elasticsearch, Kibana, and the rest of the Elastic Stack is now available. Give it a try, let us know what works and what doesn't, and please don't use it in production (yet).

The easiest way to try it out today is through start-local: curl -fsSL https://elastic.co/start-local | sh -s -- -v 9.0.0-beta1

We'll dive into more features in the following (pre-) releases, but for beta1, here is an overview of what's now available in ES|QL, the new piped query language.

Lookup joins, a highly requested feature, are the first of many planned join commands. These joins function like SQL LEFT OUTER JOINs, enabling the direct joining of data or event streams with lookup indices. The ES|QL editor suggests lookup indices and conditions to expedite query construction.

KQL filtering, the Kibana Query Language, is integrated within ES|QL queries. This integration allows for the combination of KQL's expressive filtering capabilities with ES|QL's transformation features, resulting in faster query execution and improved precision.

Semantic search is expanded with access to the Inference API, enabling more accurate AI-driven search experiences. The MATCH command now supports a wider range of field types, query parameters, and optimizations for enhanced accuracy.

The Standard Deviation function is natively available in ES|QL. A new categorization function automatically groups similar log messages to highlight patterns. Additionally, a failure store for debugging purposes is introduced to store query failures, facilitating pattern analysis and improved reliability.

ES|QL includes several internal improvements to enhance query performance: acceleration of case-insensitive matching using TO_UPPER/TO_LOWER pushdowns, smarter field capabilities detection for optimized query execution, and memory reductions for faster response times and lower resource usage.

For a complete list of features and changes, check out the release notes.

Now that Elastic Cloud Serverless has gone GA on AWS, we’re starting to expand to other cloud providers. The first one is Microsoft Azure, where we have just added the first region as a technical preview.For an in-depth, external look at it, read Arnold Van Wijnbergen’s Evaluation of Elastic Cloud Serverless on Microsoft Azure (Technical Preview).

DeepSeek R1: Learn how to run a local instance of DeepSeek and connect to it from within Kibana with Dave Erickson and Jakob Reiter. 

Vector search: Valentin Crettaz provides a quick introduction to vector search, explains how to set up vector search in Elasticsearch, and shows how to craft hybrid search queries. 

Search relevance: Peter Straßer discusses the search challenges that come with compound words and how to address them.

OpenTelemetry: Follow Bahubali Shetti as he traces a RAG-based Chatbot with Elastic distributions of OpenTelemetry and Langtrace.

Security: Detect malicious browser extensions using Elastic with Aaron Jewitt.

Elastic APM: Haidar Braimaanie explains how to monitor your C++ applications with Elastic APM.

CLIP: Jeffrey Rengifo and Tomás Murúa explore OpenAI CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training) alternatives.

Faceted search: Use facet search in Elasticsearch to narrow down options within categories with Andre Luiz.

Check out these videos:

• Building AI search: Live insights from Elastic engineering

• OTel for Python: Traces with custom spans — Daily Elastic Byte S06E04 by Jessica Garson

• OTel for Java (Traces) — Daily Elastic Byte S06E05 by Piotr Przybyl

Featured blogs and projects from the community:

• Build an AI-Powered Search System using RAG and Elasticsearch with VH Chaudhary

• When Redis hit the wall: Scaling search from thousands to millions of articles by Olga 

• Migrating off AppSearch / EntrepriseSearch, where Constant Deschietere provides some tips for moving data and queries

• CSVES (CSV to Elasticsearch): A flexible tool for importing CSV data into Elasticsearch with automatic field detection and mapping

Boston: Elasticsearch, Vectors, and Hybrid: The new era of Search — March 6

Silicon Valley: Elastic AI: Agentic Workflows & LLMs + Research for Real-World Impact — March 6 

Phoenix: Confluent x Elastic joint meetup — March 6 

Washington DC: The new era of Search, Search: a new era —  March 12

Durham: All Things Open AI — March 17–18

Dallas: Search in a Digital Thread using eQube DaaS platform & Elasticsearch — March 18

Lancaster: Community Monthly meetup —  March 19

Chicago: Elastic User Group Meetup — March 20

Seattle: Elastic + Big Data Bellevue  — March 20

Toronto: do MORE with stateLESS Elasticsearch —  March 20

Santa Clara: SRECon Americas — March 25–27 

Virtual Meetup: Real-Time Log Monitoring and Visualization Using ELK and Kafka — March 27

Seattle: Seattle Startup Summit — March 28

Zurich: DevOpsDays Zurich  — March 12–13

Paris: La crème de la crème  — March 13

Amsterdam: Elastic and Hopsworks meetup, LLM usage in building pipelines — March 13

Stockholm: Tracking abuse using intelligence with Elastic & Tele2 — March 13

Wroclaw: BoilingFrogs — March 15

Amsterdam: Webdevcon — March 21

Florence: OpenSourceDay — March 21

Saint-Herblain: ENI Tech Fest Saint-Herblain (France) — March 25

Turin: Cloud Conf — March 26

London: SREDay London — March 27–28

Ahmedabad: Laracon India — March 8–9

Elastic's free, one-day conference series is coming to you. Join us to learn what's hot at Elastic right now, watch talks or demos, and visit the ask-me-anything booth. And we have a dedicated community track with talks from Elastic engineers and community members.

Sydney: ElasticON — March 6

Join your local Elastic User Group chapter for the latest news on upcoming events! You can also find us on Meetup.com. If you’re interested in presenting at a meetup, send an email to meetups@elastic.co.