News

The Opening of X-Pack: Phase 1 Complete

In the opening keynote of ElasticON 2018, Shay announced that we would be opening the code of X-Pack. You can read more about the motivations in Shay's announcement blog and learn about the details on the dedicated page.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve taken the first big step and pushed the code of X-Pack — our security, monitoring, alerting, reporting, graph, and machine learning features — to our public repositories under the Elastic License.

So the next time you git pull or browse the source code of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, or Logstash, you will see a new folder - x-pack. Check the contributors guide of each project for any changes to the build process associated with the new code.

To be clear, while the X-Pack source code is now available in the public repositories, it isn’t under an Open Source license. The X-Pack source code is governed by the Elastic License, which grants a liberal right to build/test/contribute, but it doesn’t mean that all X-Pack features are free. Some features, like monitoring, search profiler, and the upcoming Index Management UI and Rollup API are free, while others like security and machine learning are available with a paid subscription.

One of the aspects of the opening of X-Pack that we’re most excited about is that everyone can now collaborate on public issues together. If there is a chart you wish we showed in monitoring - you can +1 an existing issue, or create your own. This allows us to get more direct feedback during development, which will help us build better features — together.

Our next big milestone will be the 6.3 release, where free X-Pack features will be included in the default distribution of the Elastic Stack. For more details and the motivations behind our plans, see Shay’s blog post, and the Opening X-Pack page. If you have questions, you can reach us @elastic on twitter, or find us on the Discuss forums.