Database Specialty - Elasticsearch Service

Question 1

Amazon Elasticsearch Service – Overview

Answer 1

• May be called Amazon ES at the exam
• Managed version of ElasticSearch (open source project)
• The ELK Stack on AWS Cloud (ElasticSearch + Logstash + Kibana)
  * ElasticSearch – provides search and indexing functionality
  * Logstash – provides log ingestion mechanism, alternative to CloudWatch Logs
  * Kibana – provides real-time dashboards for ES data, is a visualization tool
• Needs to provision servers (not a serverless offering)
• Use cases:
• Log analytics
• Real time application monitoring
• Security analytics
• Full text search
• Clickstream analytics
• Indexing

Question 2

Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana (ELK)

Answer 2

• ElasticSearch – provides search and indexing capability
  
  • You send data in the form of JSON documents to Elasticsearch using
    the API / Logstash / Firehose
  • Elasticsearch automatically adds a searchable reference to these
    documents in the cluster’s index.
• Logstash
  
  • Log ingestion mechanism, uses the “Logstash agent”
  • Alternative to CloudWatch Logs (you decide on retention and
    granularity)
• Kibana
  
  • Provides real-time dashboards on top of the data that sits in ES
  • Alternative to CloudWatch dashboards (more advanced capabilities)

Question 3

Elasticsearch Service – Multi-AZ

Answer 3

• Supports multi-AZ – up to three-AZ deployments
  (1-, 2-, or 3-AZs)
• Can be deployed within VPC
• Uses dedicated master nodes to increase cluster
  stability
• Dedicated master nodes are distributed across 3- AZs, even if you select 2-AZ deployment
• Recommended to use 3-AZs for production
• For multi-AZ, create at least one replica for each
  index in the cluster.
• Without replicas, cross-AZ replication doesn’t
  happen which largely defeats the purpose of Multi-

Question 4

Logging in Elasticsearch Service

Answer 4

• Amazon ES provides three types of
  Elasticsearch logs
  
  • error logs
  • search slow logs
  • index slow logs
• Accessible through CloudWatch Logs
• Can be enabled from within ES console (disabled by default)

Question 5

ElasticSearch Service Pricing

Answer 5

• Instance pricing (priced per hour)
  
  • On-Demand instance
  • Reserved instance – discounted pricing over 1- or 3-year term
  • UltraWarm instance – On-Demand or Managed storage (new tier
    type, cost-effective way to store large amounts of read-only data)
• EBS volume pricing (magnetic, general purpose, and
  provisioned IOPS)
• Standard data transfer charges
• Automated snapshots – free with 14-day retention
• Manual snapshots – per GB