Product release

Elastic Stack Release - 5.0.0-alpha5

By
Shay Banon

So many alphas. So many new things we want the community to explore, utilize, abuse, and...hopefully...find compelling. The release train continues. (*choo choo*)

It’s here!  Say “Heya” to alpha 5. Or, say “aye-yi-yi-yi-yi” if you would prefer...

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, you'll be able to deploy releases on the day of 5.0 GA. (We wouldn't want you to wait for all this goodness!) 

If you open a bug report, today, you too can become an Elastic Pioneer. And now, without further ado, some highlights from alpha 5.

Elasticsearch

For more detailed information, and many other features, peruse the Elasticsearch detail post.

  • Friendly index creation - Primary shards are now allocated before response during index creation. Less red states, happier admins.
  • Aggregation improvements - Fractional buckets, and safer, smarter handling of bigtime aggregations...Know what we are talking about?  Check it out.
  • Even better handling of numeric data - Elasticsearch 5 is a powerhouse for metrics data. We are counting on alpha 5’s new scaled_float -- along with even more performance and storage improvements to the BKD tree -- to make numb3rs even more powerful for you.

From 2.3.x to 5.0. The magical journey. The undiscovered country. The next frontier. Other coined phrases. As a reminder, 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

We’re heads down and laying the groundwork for beta1 throughout Kibana, but we couldn’t help but squeeze a few key updates into this release.

  • Tile map visualizations are working again, backed by the Elastic Tile Service, and configurable to your heart’s content.
  • The autorefresh feature of timepicker is back and better than ever. Well, it’s exactly the same as before, but we’re convinced the way it was before is the best it’s ever been!

Logstash

“Go faster”, you said. “Ok!”, we replied. Speed and a few more additions feature highly in this release.

  • More performance increases -- Beats input has been reimplemented in Java and is 50% faster
  • Comma separated resources to easily filter monitoring API responses
  • Per column encoding support for JDBC input.

Beats

We may collect data from the edge, but all the updates are in a single Beats detail post.

  • Beats 1.x, Elasticsearch 2.x and 5.x. Sound confusing when planning using Beats templates? It isn’t. We query ES versions and load the best template for you!
  • Filtering flexibility based on conditions - Simple filtering combined with logical operators for the win.

ES-Hadoop

ES-Hadoop v 5.0.0-alpha5 has also been released today. Peruse all the information in the detail post.

  • Spark 2.0 - Yup, you read it right. In fact, it is so good, we will say it again...this time with bold...Spark 2.0!

Get it Now!

Happy testing. Your feedback is instrumental in making 5.0 successful. And, don't forget that X-Pack is here and continually being udpated with each Alpha release.