Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production

Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by amelius on Monday March 14, 2016 @06:42AM (#11282044)

How difficult would it be for the elasticsearch team to make the software run smoothly as a black box, i.e., without administrator supervision?

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by eyepulp on Monday March 14, 2016 @09:34AM (#11282754)

We went through various configurations/deployments of ES in-house, and eventually outsourced the job. The fickle nature of cluster restarts/upgrades were frustrating along with the unassigned & lost indexes that would often result. Then there were cluster partitions that wouldn't heal without a lot of manual intervention.

The tradeoff in value wasn't worth the time it was requiring, so we outsourced to compose.io -- they've been a good fit price & stability-wise, and feel pretty close to a blackbox for the benefit. If you need a large cluster however, you'll pay handsomely with any of the SaaS providers when last I looked at it. For large quantity work we've moved to AWS Redshift.

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by The_Magistrate on Monday March 14, 2016 @08:40AM (#11282469)

It's actually fairly difficult. There are so many different possible combinations of incoming data quality, quantity, system and disk configuration, performance and internal ES settings. Only an administrator would be familiar enough with the environment to monitor and tweak the configuration to make it the most performant.

There are a few hosted elasticsearch services available (Elastic Cloud, AWS ES, Qbox, etc) which would likely be a better option for the team that needed a hands-off elasticsearch cluster.

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by PretzelFisch on Monday March 14, 2016 @09:48AM (#11282847)

We chose found.io I figure since they write the code it better run smoothly for us.

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by chucky_z on Monday March 14, 2016 @10:28AM (#11283060)

Our indexes are probably very small (about 40gb total) but I've found if you value speed and consistency over all else.... just run a single, 1 shard node and have a fallback in case of random errors. I just do major version upgrades and rebuild the indexes, no real maintenance.

I should add that all "hot" data fits in 24g of memory.

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by pinouchon on Monday March 14, 2016 @09:10AM (#11282633)

If what you need is just search, you could try a SaaS, such as Algolia (https://www.algolia.com/)

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by amelius on Monday March 14, 2016 @03:27PM (#11284942)

If you have a non-disclosure agreement with your clients, you cannot outsource any data processing / search. So in many cases a SaaS solution is a no-go, unfortunately.

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by adamowen on Monday March 14, 2016 @10:37AM (#11283097)

+1. Algolia rocks. (https://www.spiralmedia.co.uk/implementing-lightning-fast-al...)

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by wsvincent on Monday March 14, 2016 @01:56PM (#11284313)

+1 Algolia too. Fast, simple, easy to tweak. It just works.

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by Chris2048 on Monday March 14, 2016 @09:24AM (#11282704)

Who'd pay them for support if everything ran smoothly?

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by chucky_z on Monday March 14, 2016 @11:44AM (#11283476)

People pay for RHEL, SUSE, Windows, Mongo, MySQL, etc.. support even though they may be part of a company perfectly capable of resolving any issue with the software. You get more than just basic support with all of these contracts. =)

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by throwaway_xx9 on Monday March 14, 2016 @04:17PM (#11285262)

> People pay for RHEL, SUSE, Windows, Mongo, MySQL, etc.. support even though they may be part of a company perfectly capable of resolving any issue with the software.

Regarding those examples:

1) For RHEL and Windows, paying is not optional 2) Mongo is so buggy most people need to pay for support in production 3) MySQL works well, but don't expect anything more than "forum answers" from Oracle support. Only 1 in 1000 companies paid for support according to the former president of MySQL AB.

Actually, companies are reluctant to pay for support for Open Source products, hence the business model tweaks of Redhat and the Open Core models of Nagios and other smaller Open Source vendors.

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by hodwik on Monday March 14, 2016 @10:10AM (#11282961)

We've run it without supervision for about a year now at multiple sites, and have not had any major issues.

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Re:Lessons Learned from a Year of Elasticsearch in Production by brazzledazzle on Monday March 14, 2016 @11:22AM (#11283336)

Any chance you could provide configs and/or insight for the other people here who have problems?

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