Announcing Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes 1.0.0 Beta
Today we are proud to announce the 1.0.0-beta1 release of Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK)! This new release brings architectural changes in how we manage Elasticsearch with ECK. These changes allow you to manage faster upgrades and support even more use cases.
StatefulSets
With this release, ECK is moving to StatefulSet-based orchestration rather than managing pods directly for Elasticsearch. StatefulSets are Kubernetes objects designed for stateful applications such as Elasticsearch and provide predictable behavior when performing upgrades or configuration changes. StatefulSets with ECK allow for even faster upgrades and configuration changes, as well as better usability when leveraging powerful Elasticsearch architectures such as hot-warm-cold.
Faster upgrades and configuration changes
Prior to 1.0.0-beta1, upgrading a cluster with terabytes of data could take hours or even days because data was replicated to new Elasticsearch nodes. Now, with StatefulSets, you can upgrade an application and reuse the same persistent volume, rather than replicating the data to new nodes. Reusing persistent volumes lets you cut the upgrade time down to minutes for terabytes of data — while also saving you the data transfer costs of replication.
This speed brings enormous value for observability and logging use cases with ECK, where you may be ingesting terabytes of data per day on top of a hot-warm-cold topology.
New API version and compatibility
ECK 1.0.0-beta1 introduces v1beta1, a new API version of the various custom resources. The new custom resources are not compatible with previous ECK alpha releases. Existing users must migrate to v1beta1 to use the new ECK features. ECK 1.0.0-beta1 can be installed on top of the current ECK alpha versions. The new version of ECK will leave older resources in place, but will not modify them. To receive all of the benefits of ECK 1.0.0-beta1, we recommend deleting and recreating existing Elasticsearch clusters and other resources.
What else is new?
In addition to the StatefulSet adoption, with ECK 1.0.0-beta1 you can also disable TLS on the HTTP layer, which can be useful if you are already leveraging a service mesh such as Istio. Check out the 1.0.0-beta1 release notes for a full list of new features.