Quickstart

With Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) you can extend the basic Kubernetes orchestration capabilities to easily deploy, secure, upgrade your Elasticsearch cluster, and much more.

Eager to get started? This quick guide shows you how to:

Supported versions

Apply a simple Elasticsearch cluster specification, with one Elasticsearch node:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/v1beta1
kind: Elasticsearch
metadata:
  name: quickstart
spec:
  version: 8.16.1
  nodeSets:
  - name: default
    count: 1
    config:
      node.master: true
      node.data: true
      node.ingest: true
      node.store.allow_mmap: false
EOF

The operator automatically creates and manages Kubernetes resources to achieve the desired state of the Elasticsearch cluster. It may take up to a few minutes until all the resources are created and the cluster is ready for use.

Get an overview of the current Elasticsearch clusters in the Kubernetes cluster, including health, version and number of nodes:

kubectl get elasticsearch

NAME          HEALTH    NODES     VERSION   PHASE         AGE
quickstart    green     1         8.16.1     Ready         1m

When you create the cluster, there is no HEALTH status and the PHASE is empty. After a while, the PHASE turns into Ready, and HEALTH becomes green.

You can see that one Pod is in the process of being started:

kubectl get pods --selector='elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/cluster-name=quickstart'

NAME                      READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
quickstart-es-default-0   1/1     Running   0          79s

Access the logs for that Pod:

kubectl logs -f quickstart-es-default-0

A ClusterIP Service is automatically created for your cluster:

kubectl get service quickstart-es-http

NAME                 TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)    AGE
quickstart-es-http   ClusterIP   10.15.251.145   <none>        9200/TCP   34m

{
  "name" : "quickstart-es-default-0",
  "cluster_name" : "quickstart",
  "cluster_uuid" : "XqWg0xIiRmmEBg4NMhnYPg",
  "version" : {...},
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}

To deploy your Kibana instance go through the following steps.

You can add and modify most elements of the original cluster specification provided that they translate to valid transformations of the underlying Kubernetes resources (e.g., existing volume claims cannot be resized). The operator will attempt to apply your changes with minimal disruption to the existing cluster. You should ensure that the Kubernetes cluster has sufficient resources to accommodate the changes (extra storage space, sufficient memory and CPU resources to temporarily spin up new pods etc.).

For example, you can grow the cluster to three Elasticsearch nodes:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/v1beta1
kind: Elasticsearch
metadata:
  name: quickstart
spec:
  version: 8.16.1
  nodeSets:
  - name: default
    count: 3
    config:
      node.master: true
      node.data: true
      node.ingest: true
      node.store.allow_mmap: false
EOF

The cluster that you deployed in this quickstart guide only allocates a persistent volume of 1GiB for storage using the default storage class defined for the Kubernetes cluster. You will most likely want to have more control over this for production workloads. Refer to Volume claim templates for more information.

You can find a set of sample resources in the project repository. To customize the Elasticsearch resource, check the Elasticsearch sample.

For a full description of each CustomResourceDefinition, go to the project repository. You can also retrieve it from the cluster. For example, describe the Elasticsearch CRD specification with:

kubectl describe crd elasticsearch