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 fast guide shows you how to:

Requirements

Make sure that you have kubectl version 1.11+ installed.

Apply a simple Elasticsearch cluster specification, with one node:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/v1alpha1
kind: Elasticsearch
metadata:
  name: quickstart
spec:
  version: 7.2.0
  nodes:
  - nodeCount: 1
    config:
      node.master: true
      node.data: true
      node.ingest: true
EOF

The operator automatically manages Pods and resources corresponding to the desired cluster. It may take up to a few minutes until the cluster is ready.

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         7.2.0     Operational   1m

When you create the cluster, there is no HEALTH status and the PHASE is Pending. After a while, the PHASE turns into Operational, 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-5zctxpn8nd   1/1       Running   0          1m

Access the logs for that Pod:

kubectl logs -f quickstart-es-5zctxpn8nd

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-r56c9dzzcr",
  "cluster_name" : "quickstart",
  "cluster_uuid" : "XqWg0xIiRmmEBg4NMhnYPg",
  "version" : {...},
  "tagline" : "You Know, for Search"
}

To deploy your Kibana instance go through the following steps.

You can apply any modification to the original cluster specification. The operator makes sure that your changes are applied to the existing cluster, while avoiding downtime.

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

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/v1alpha1
kind: Elasticsearch
metadata:
  name: quickstart
spec:
  version: 7.2.0
  nodes:
  - nodeCount: 3
    config:
      node.master: true
      node.data: true
      node.ingest: true
EOF

Now that you have completed the quickstart, you can try out more features like tweaking persistent storage. The cluster that you deployed in this quickstart uses a default persistent volume claim of 1GiB, without a storage class set. This means that the default storage class defined in the Kubernetes cluster is the one that will be provisioned.

You can request a PersistentVolumeClaim with a larger size in the Elasticsearch specification or target any PersistentVolume class available in your Kubernetes cluster:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: elasticsearch.k8s.elastic.co/v1alpha1
kind: Elasticsearch
metadata:
  name: quickstart
spec:
  version: 7.2.0
  nodes:
  - nodeCount: 3
    config:
      node.master: true
      node.data: true
      node.ingest: true
    volumeClaimTemplates:
    - metadata:
        name: elasticsearch-data # note: elasticsearch-data must be the name of the Elasticsearch volume
      spec:
        accessModes:
        - ReadWriteOnce
        resources:
          requests:
            storage: 10Gi
        #storageClassName: standard # can be any available storage class
EOF

To aim for the best performance, the operator supports persistent volumes local to each node. For more details, see:

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