Ever since it hit the web in 2010, Elasticsearch has been one of the best options for any business looking to boost their search engine capabilities. Most do so in order to find and better organize customer records.
Nowadays, companies are dealing with an ever-growing database of customer information and other sensitive details about their clients and purchases. Search engines like Google probably come to mind when you think of searching for information. However, a search functionality that can integrate into all sorts of businesses is similarly important. This can help you and your staff to get work done in an efficient and timely manner.
Elasticsearch is open-source software. This has made it easy for companies large and small in a variety of industries to adopt it. For example, some of the most common industries to implement Elasticsearch software are the healthcare industry and governmental agencies. Additionally, enterprise-level businesses that have to interface with a large amount of personal data on a regular basis have adopted Elasticsearch.
Here are a few answers to some of the most commonly asked questions about how companies can use Elasticsearch. We start with looking at how much it will cost your business to implement this software.
Is Elasticsearch Free?
In a word, yes. Elasticsearch is open-source software. This means that its creators provide it free of charge. Moreover, users can implement it in a variety of environments. This includes businesses or organizations already running on another platform, such as Amazon Web Services.
Best of all, Elasticsearch comes with the powerful Kibana tool. This tool provides ways to integrate a visual reporting element with Elasticsearch to make the most of your free software. To keep costs even lower, there is a variety of other free plugins to consider adding on top of your Elastic stack. These can provide even more functionality. For example, language analyzers offer a more robust search engine experience.
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What Exactly Is Open-Source Software?
All right, so you know that the fact that Elasticsearch is open-source means that you can use it for free. But what else does being open-source amount to?
Besides being free, open-source means that people can access and modify the code for the software in order to adapt it to meet their own needs. This makes it easy for users to learn from inspecting the source code of the software. Then, you can enhance it by way of your own coding knowledge and expertise. As a result, you get exactly the kind of functionality you need when you’re using this type of software.
While it’s technically true that you could look at and modify the code of any piece of software, something explicitly designated as open-source means that its makers encourage and empower you to make these sorts of changes. This also means that you’re altering the software legally. Otherwise, you could be breaking your end-user agreement or other rules and regulations apply to the software as you’ve licensed it.
Why Should You Use Elasticsearch?
There are a variety of reasons to consider using Elasticsearch in your business or organization. First, as we have mentioned, it’s free of charge.
Naturally, that could be a contributing factor in your decision. Additionally, when it comes to a full-text search engine that builds upon machine learning technology, the Elasticsearch service is pretty much hands down the best option out there.
Elasticsearch is simple and intuitive. This makes it easy to install, customize, and implement. It also supports a variety of programming languages for easy application development. These include popular languages such as PHP, Java, Python, and Ruby.
Moreover, as a distributed system, Elasticsearch is also well-equipped for processing a high volume of data. It will get you the results you need from whatever queries you put into it.
Perhaps best of all, Elasticsearch offers all of this performance in almost real-time. In fact, it processes most queries in a second or less.
