Product release

Elastic Stack Release - 5.0.0 alpha 2

By
Shay Banon

In our post Elastic Stack Release - 5.0.0 alpha 1, we discussed the background of the release and the reason behind the Elastic Stack. So, this time, we will get right into the detail. Before you get too excited, keep in mind that this is still an alpha so don’t put it into production. And, since it is an alpha it is not available on Elastic Cloud. But, because Elastic Cloud is the official hosted Elasticsearch and Kibana offering on AWS -- the only hosted Elastic Stack offering with 5.0 upon release will be Elastic Cloud.

If you open a bug report, today, you too can become an Elastic Pioneer. And now, without further ado, some highlights from alpha 2.

Elasticsearch

For more detailed information, and quite a few other features, peruse the Elasticsearch detail post.

  • Percolate Query - Remember the Percolate API? We took some time to let the ideas of improvements simmer or…well….percolate. Introducing the percolate query.
  • Lucene 6.0 GA  - In 5.0 alpha 1, we planted the seeds of multi-dimensional points. Like a carefully tended garden, we continue to reap their benefits of them in the form of IPv6 addresses supported in the standard ip type now.

From 2.3.x to 5.0. The magical journey. The undiscovered country. The next frontier. Other coined phrases. In addition to alpha 2, we’ve also released the Migration Helper, which runs on your existing 2.3 cluster.  Use this site plugin to prep for your migration.

Kibana

For more detailed information, and all the PR links in one place, visualize the future in the Kibana detail post.

In the last release we mentioned that we hadn’t lost our sense. In alpha 2, we officially found our Console. Make sense? No? It doesn’t?

Sense is now known as Console and it ships with Kibana.

Logstash

  • GeoIP filter has been updated to support MaxMind’s GeoIP2 database which means you can lookup IPv6 addresses, get new location fields and much more…
  • Oh and did we mention Elasticsearch now has native IPv6 support? YOU GET AN IPv6! AND YOU GET AN IPv6!
  • Take advantage of Elasticsearch’s ingest pipelines in Logstash. So, do some processing in Elasticsearch while sending raw data to S3 and 30+ outputs.

Download the Logstash packages from here.

Beats

The Redis output in Beats just got a whole lot better, supporting the same level of guarantees as the other outputs, SOCKS5 proxies, and encryption. The downloadable Beats packages also got a new directory layout which is more consistent with the one used by Elasticsearch and they now also include sample Kibana dashboards. You can find more details about these changes in the dedicated blog post.

X-Pack

  • Breaking All X-Pack settings changed to use the xpack.* prefix:
    • shield.* → xpack.security.*
    • watcher.* → xpack.watcher.*
    • marvel.* → xpack.monitoring.*
  • A new X-Pack Info API was added (replaced old Shield & Watcher Info APIs)
  • X-Pack now ships with two built-in users: elastic (with full admin privileges) and kibana (used by the Kibana server). Aside from changing their passwords, these users cannot be modified
  • Introduced the new fixed built-in superuser role. A user with this role can impersonate any user and has full access to the cluster and all indices
  • Simplified Security configuration in Kibana - only configure the kibana user password once updated

ES-Hadoop

But wait, there’s more! ES-Hadoop v 5.0.0-alpha2 has also been released today.