Glossary

This glossary covers Elastic Cloud Enterprise. If a term is not in this list, you can also look in the Elasticsearch glossary.

administration console: A component of Elastic Cloud Enterprise that provides the API server for the Cloud UI. Also syncs cluster and allocator data from ZooKeeper to Elasticsearch.
allocator: Manages hosts that contain Elasticsearch and Kibana nodes. Controls the lifecycle of these nodes by creating new containers and managing the nodes within these containers when requested. Used to scale the capacity of your Elastic Cloud Enterprise installation.
allocator affinity: Controls how Elastic Stack deployments are distributed across the available set of allocators in your ECE installation.
allocator tag: Characterizes hardware resources for Elastic Stack deployments. Used by instance configurations to determine which instances of the Elastic Stack should be placed on what hardware.
APM Server: A running instance of the application performance monitoring server, which receives data from APM Agents and transforms them into documents stored on the Elasticsearch cluster.
availability zone: Contains resources available to an Elastic Cloud Enterprise installation that are isolated from other availability zones to safeguard against failure. Could be a rack, a server zone, or some other logical constraint that creates a failure boundary. In a highly available cluster, the nodes of a cluster are spread across two or three availability zones to ensure that the cluster can survive the failure of an entire availability zone. Also check high availability.
beats runner: Used to send Filebeat and Metricbeat information to the logging cluster.
client forwarder: Used for secure internal communications between various components of Elastic Cloud Enterprise and ZooKeeper.
Cloud UI: Provides web-based access to manage your Elastic Cloud Enterprise installation, supported by the administration console.
cluster, Elasticsearch cluster: One or more Elasticsearch nodes which share the same cluster name.
constructor: Directs allocators to manage containers of Elasticsearch and Kibana nodes and maximizes the utilization of allocators. Monitors plan change requests from the Cloud UI and determines how to transform the existing cluster. In a highly available installation, places cluster nodes within different availability zones to ensure that the cluster can survive the failure of an entire availability zone.
container: Includes an instance of Elastic Cloud Enterprise software and its dependencies. Used to provision similar environments, to assign a guaranteed share of host resources to nodes, and to simplify operational effort in Elastic Cloud Enterprise.
coordinator: An internal Elastic Cloud Enterprise component that logically groups services and acts as a distributed coordination system and resource scheduler.
director: Manages the ZooKeeper datastore. This role is often shared with the coordinator, though in production deployments it can be separated.
data center: Check availability zone.
deployment: One or more products from the Elastic Stack configured to work together and running on Elastic Cloud Enterprise.
deployment template: A deployable, reusable configuration of Elastic products and solutions.
Elastic Cloud, EC: The official hosted Elastic Stack offering, from the makers of Elasticsearch. Available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering on different cloud platforms, such as AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure.
Elastic Cloud Enterprise, ECE: The official enterprise offering host and manage the Elastic Stack yourself at scale. Can be installed on a public cloud platform, such as AWS, GCP or Microsoft Azure, on your own private cloud, or on bare metal.
Elastic Stack: Also known as the ELK Stack, the Elastic Stack is the combination of various Elastic products that integrate for a scalable and flexible way to manage your data.
hardware profile: A built-in template that supports a specific use case for the Elastic Stack, such as a cluster with a hot-warm architecture.
instance: A product from the Elastic Stack that is running in a deployment, such as an Elasticsearch node or a Kibana instance. When you choose more availability zones, the system automatically creates more instances for you.
instance configuration: Enables the instances of the Elastic Stack to run on suitable hardware resources by filtering on allocator tags. Used as building blocks for deployment templates.
instance type: Categories for instances representing an Elastic feature or cluster node types, such as master, ml or data.
Kibana: The free and open analytics and visualization platform designed to work with Elasticsearch.
machine learning node, ML node: A type of Elasticsearch node that is designed to model the behavior of your Elasticsearch data to detect anomalies.
master node: Responsible for cluster-wide actions, such as creating or deleting an index, tracking which nodes are part of the cluster, and deciding which shards to allocate to which nodes. Improves the resilience of Elasticsearch, but does not handle requests and does not hold any data. Master nodes need fewer CPU and memory resources and less storage than other nodes. Also check node in this glossary and Node in the Elasticsearch documentation.
node: A running instance of Elasticsearch which belongs to a cluster, typically one per host. Nodes will look to discover an existing cluster by the same name when they start up and try to join that cluster.
plan: Specifies the configuration and topology of an Elasticsearch or Kibana cluster, such as capacity, availability, and Elasticsearch version, for example. When changing a plan, the constructor determines how to transform the existing cluster into the pending plan.
proxy: A highly available, TLS-enabled proxy layer that routes user requests, mapping cluster IDs that are passed in request URLs for the container to the cluster nodes handling the user requests.
roles token: Enables a host to join an existing ECE installation and grants permission to hosts to hold certain roles, such as the allocator role. Used when installing ECE on additional hosts, a roles token helps secure ECE by making sure that only authorized hosts become part of the installation.
host runner: A local control agent that runs on all hosts, used to deploy local containers based on role definitions. Ensures that containers assigned to the host exist and are able to run, and creates or recreates the containers if necessary.
services forwarder: Routes data internally in an Elastic Cloud Enterprise installation.
solution: Deployments with specialized templates that are pre-configured with sensible defaults and settings for common use cases.

tiebreaker: Prevents cases of split brain in distributed clusters, where a cluster splits into multiple, autonomous parts that continue to handle requests independently of each other, at the risk of affecting cluster consistency and data loss. Ensures a quorum-based majority of (n/2)+1 nodes, where n is the number of nodes in the cluster. The minimum number of master nodes to reach quorum in a two-node cluster is the same as for a three-node cluster: two nodes must be available.
vCPU: vCPU stands for virtual central processing unit. vCPUs are virtual compute units assigned to your nodes. The value is dependent on the size and hardware profile of the instance. The instance may be eligible for vCPU boosting depending on the size.
ZooKeeper: A coordination service for distributed systems used by Elastic Cloud Enterprise to store the state of the installation. Responsible for discovery of hosts, resource allocation, leader election after failure and high priority notifications.

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