Culture

AMA (Ask Me Anything) World Recap, Bigger Than Ever For Elastic{ON}16

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At Elastic, we love the community that uses the Elastic Stack to build amazing products and help solve problems. We recently just wrapped up the world Elastic{ON} Tour where we held 12 one-day events sharing roadmaps, customer use cases, demos, and much more.

One of the mutual favorite parts of the Elastic{ON} Tour was the AMA Booth (Ask Me Anything). We read and listen to every piece of feedback and know that asking our engineers, consultants, and architects about details of the various parts of the Elastic Stack is what our users loved the most. We love working the AMA as well and it helps us share new features, explain how things are implemented, share architectures, and offer guidance to make things faster or debug pesky problems.

Coming this February 17 - 19 in San Francisco at Elastic{ON}, our annual Elasticsearch user conference, the AMA will be a station of amazement full of Elastic engineers, tech leads, founders, and the creators of open source projects Logstash, Kibana, and Beats.

Due to this popularity, without further ado, here is a list of our favorite AMA Booth moments and questions:

Popular Questions

    • I'm Getting Ready to upgrade from 1.x to 2.x, what suggestions do you have?
    • What is Found? What's the difference between Found and Amazon Elasticsearch Service?
      • Found is the only official hosted and managed Elasticsearch offering on the market. It was created by and is fully supported by Elastic's engineers. There is no partnership between Elastic and Amazon.
      • Found has been GA since May 2013 and we have experience hosting and managing thousands of Elasticsearch clusters in the cloud including Docker, Instacart, HotelTonight, and more.
      • Found is on the latest 2.x release of Elasticsearch, includes Kibana 4.x and Elastic's commercial plugin's Shield (security), Watcher (alerting), and Marvel (monitoring) and only Elastic can provide commercial product functionality and support by the creators of the product.
    • Where's the Bathroom? What's the WIFI?
      • while it was different for every location, we had signs and were able to point in the general direction
    • What's your favorite Simpsons episode?
      • everybody on their team has their own, but personally I'm a South Park person

AMA Booth Moments

  • Shake hands and say hi to someone we've met for the first time in person even though we've interacted virtually on a support ticket, Github pull request, or discussion forum.
  • Finding a stool/chair for about 30 minutes in between peak times to rest your legs before standing and fielding more questions.
  • Seeing large smiles when we help solve a problem, provide guidance on an architecture, or talk about the improvements in each release.
  • Rickrolling (never gonna give you up) your fellow AMA Booth Worker so when they open their laptop to show someone some code or documentation, the infamous video plays at full volume.
  • Giving out thousands of stickers that find their way onto laptops, notebooks, refrigerators, or even kids lunch boxes and toys.

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These reasons ultimately are why we feel the AMA Booth is a critical part of our events and will continue to be. For Elastic{ON}16 (San Francisco, February 17-19) we are going bigger and better with the AMA. We'll have the largest AMA Booth ever, with every single technical resource in our company at the conference. The AMA will be open almost the entire time of the conference too. So bring your thirst for knowledge, your hardest questions and we look forwarding to Answering Anything…. well almost anything.