Product release

Elastic Stack 8.0.0-alpha1 released

By
Philipp Krenn

While the 7.x minors keep delivering feature after feature, we are thrilled to announce the first public alpha of 8.0.0.

Before we continue with this exciting news, we want to remind you that this is an alpha version. We recommend that you keep it an arm's length from production. There is no guarantee that 8.0.0-alpha1 will be compatible with other preview releases or with 8.0.0 general availability (GA).

Also, 8.0.0-alpha1 will not be available on Elastic Cloud. But, we expect to make a preview version available in the coming months.

The Elastic Pioneer Program

We are also excited to bring back the Elastic Pioneer Program for 8.0. The Pioneer Program debuted in version 5.0 to recognize community participation and feedback. It has been a source of invaluable feedback during the preview periods of the previous major releases. We are excited to bring it back for the fourth time in a row.

A major release means new features and significant changes. We choose to do an extended preview period for our major releases to ensure that we have enough cycles to battle-test the release and cover as many customer scenarios as we can before making it GA. We would love your help in that journey.

Our users are constantly pushing the boundaries on our products. You are using it for new use cases and plugging it into unique architectures that go beyond even the best testing harness. We want to know where things break for you, in your setup, for your unique use case — so that we can do our best to address them before the GA release.

We value your inputs, and the Pioneer Program is our way of saying: "Dear user, thank you for taking the time to try this out and giving your feedback. Our products are better because of your participation, and we are eternally grateful."

To become an Elastic Pioneer, try out the preview of any (preferably, every) part of the Elastic Stack and open issues as you find them in the appropriate repo — Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, Logstash, and APM. When you open an issue, mention that you found the bug in 8.0.0-alpha1, and we’ll add a “Pioneer Program” label.

Every use case is different, so be sure to test yours out thoroughly. You may find a bug that only impacts your unique environment or dataset, which means you might be the only person able to find it. Be your own hero, and find that bug before we get to GA.

Try it out

And now, without any further ado, we bring to you 8.0.0-alpha1. Happy downloading. Go forth, and explore.

Elastic Stack

Elastic Enterprise Search

Elastic Observability

Elastic Security