This Week in Elasticsearch - December 10, 2014

Welcome to This Week in Elasticsearch. In this roundup, we try to inform you about the latest and greatest changes in Elasticsearch. We cover what happened in the GitHub repositories, as well as many Elasticsearch events happening worldwide, and give you a small peek into the future of the project.

Elasticsearch Core

  • Java API: QueryBuilders cleanup: remove deprecated (#8721, master only)
  • TransportClient: Add internal liveness action (#8763, master only)
  • Streams: Remove runtime version checks (#8768, master only)
  • Core: Removed slow scroll, because master (2.0) requires full cluster restart coming from previous versions (#8780, master)
  • Gateway: GatewayService should register cluster state listener before checking for current state (#8789, master and 1.x)
  • Packaging: Prevent debian init script from returning when the service isn't actually started (#6909, master and 1.x)
  • Packaging: Add systemd service config on Debian for upcoming Jessie (#8756, master and 1.x)
  • Packaging: Make ES user own plugins dir, remove on uninstall (#8732, master and 1.x)
  • Snapshot/Restore: switch to write once mode for snapshot metadata files (#8782, master)
  • Allocation: Speed-up disk-threshold decider (#8803, master, 1.x and 1.4)
  • Packaging: Check if proc file exists before calling sysctl (#8793, master and 1.x)
  • Scripting: Add explicit error message when script_score script returns NaN (#2426, master and 1.x)
  • Store: Expose ShardId via LeafReader rather than Directory API (#8812, master)
  • Internal: Allow InternalEngine to be stopped and started (#8784, master and 1.x)
  • Engine: Add engine lifecycle store reference to EngineHolder (#8821, master and 1.x)
  • Stats: Add more fine grained memory stats from Lucene segment reader (#8832, master)
  • Core: also log byte size and doc count when we log slow merges (#8853, master, 1.x and 1.4)

Elasticsearch Ecosystem

Here's some more information about what is happening in the ecosystem we are maintaining around the ELK stack - that's Elasticsearch plus Logstash and Kibana - including plugin and driver releases.

  • We released Elasticsearch.Net and NEST 1.3, including new security features, a new property name mapping API and a number of other improvements. You can get full details on the release from Greg Marzouka.
  • Mason Leung provided some insight into how Sharethrough's engineering team is using the ELK stack - including how they got started and the benefits they're already seeing - in a great blog post titled Elk-ing all the way.
  • At last week's Elasticsearch meetup in Chicago, Dan Crumb (of our lovely meetup host, Vodori) gave a demonstration using Docker and Fig to easily run Elasticsearch in containers on a laptop. He's now shared the code and the how-to behind his demonstration, and video is available from the meetup, as well.
  • Vadiraj Joish has a tutorial explaining the fundamentals of Logstash, as well as how to install and configure Logstash on Linux with Elasticsearch, Redis, and Nginx.
  • Gert Leenders shared some in-depth tips on the optimization of relevance scores in Elasticsearch, including how boosting works, as well as boosting by date and by popularity.
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Slides & Videos

Jason Kendall at last week's Elasticsearch meetup in Chicago, presenting "Extending your logs: Why not make your logs do the legwork?"

Greg DeKoenigsberg, VP of Community at Ansible, was also caught on video at last week's meetup in Chicago, walking the audience through the steps for how he set up Elasticsearch + Logstash with Ansible for his very own analytics purposes.

Where to Find Us

We'd love to feature all the great Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana presentations and meetups happening worldwide in this section. If you're speaking or hosting a meetup, let our Director of Developer Relations, Leslie Hawthorn, know!

France

The Elasticsearch France Meetup will return to Paris for Meetup #11 on December 17. This meetup always fills quickly, so register now to save your place.

Germany

And, for folks in or around Bonn on December 18, the Bonn ELK Meetup group will be holding their inaugural meetup. Register now to save your place.

Spain

Additionally, our own Pere Urbón-Bayes will be joining the Barcelona Meetup on January 8 to share his presentation titled, "Make sense of your data with Elasticsearch." Register now to save your place.

United States

  • The Washington, DC Elasticsearch Meetup for December will be hosted by Comcast on the 11th and will feature Bhaskar Karambelkar, Tech Lead at Verizon, on scaling Elasticsearch in Production. Register now to save your place.

Where to Find You

PSST! If you're a regular reader of This Week in Elasticsearch, a.k.a TWIES, you're thinking of skipping this section. You may even be thinking to yourself, yes of course I will drop a note on Twitter when I am giving a talk on all things ELK. That's awesome, because we'd like to showcase every meetup, conference presentation and workshop on Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana happening worldwide. And now, we've made it even easier for you to get support for your meetup!

Head on over to our meetups page! (And we'll still totally send you swag if you're giving a talk on anything ELKy at a conference.)

Oh yeah, we're also hiring. If you'd like us to find you for employment purposes, just drop us a note.  We care more about your skill set and passion for Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash than where you rest your head.

Trainings

If you are interested in Elasticsearch training we have courses taught by our core developers coming up in:

  • Berlin - December 15, 2014 (Getting Started Workshop)
  • Bangalore - December 15, 2014 (Getting Started Workshop)
  • Bangalore - December 16, 2014 (Core Elasticsearch Training)
  • London - December 18, 2014 (Elasticsearch Core Training)
  • Cologne - January 13, 2015 (Getting Started Workshop)
  • Redwood City - January 13, 2015 (Getting Started Workshop)
  • Mountain View - January 14, 2015 (Core Elasticsearch Training)
  • Berlin - January 15, 2015 (Core Elasticsearch Training)
  • Chicago - January 15, 2015 (Core Elasticsearch Training)
  • Washington DC - January 21, 2015 (Core Elasticsearch Training)
  • Seattle - January 21, 2015 (Core Elasticsearch Training)
  • Paris - January 21, 2015 (Getting Started Workshop)
  • Paris - January 22, 2015 (Core Elasticsearch Training)