News

Explore the Elastic Stack 5.0 with the Elastic Pioneer Program

By
Michelle Carroll

This week, we released the alpha 1 of the fully unified version 5.0 of the Elastic Stack and X-Pack. You can test the new goodness in the Elastic Stack 5.0 today, by downloading the Alpha 1 candidates. This pre-release period is incredibly important. As much as we test the software before release, there are users with environments we haven’t conceived of, and folks using the Elastic Stack in ways we’ve never seen. We want to know the limits of our stack, and do everything we can to improve it before general release. We’re launching the Elastic Pioneer Program to encourage folks to try the latest version.

What is the Elastic Pioneer Program?

We’re very excited about these upcoming Elastic Stack Version 5.0 releases, but we want to make sure they’re perfect (or as perfect as software gets) before they ship more broadly. Everyone who reports a legitimate bug on the pre-release of the software will be recognized for the wider release, and receive a special Elastic gift package as our thank you. If you find something particularly tricky, you could also earn a free ticket to Elastic{ON}17, coming up next March 7 – 9 in San Francisco.

How to participate

To join the program, just try out the pre-release of any (preferably, every) part of the Elastic Stack, and open issues as you find them in the appropriate repo (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Beats, Kibana) or Discuss forum. When you open an issue, mention that you found the bug in 5.0.0-alpha1/2/beta1, and we’ll add a “Pioneer Program” label. While we appreciate the information, duplicate issues won’t enter you into the program.

Note: This is an alpha release and is intended for testing purposes only. There is no guarantee that any of the 5.0.0-alpha1 versions will be compatible with other pre-releases, or the 5.0.0 GA. We strongly recommend that you keep this far, far away from production.

We hope you’ll join us in trying the pre-release versions of the Elastic Stack 5.0! Download the alpha-1 versions, or learn more about the pre-release.