Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) 1.0 Is Now Generally Available

Elastic announced that Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) is moving out of beta and into general availability.

As Elastic announced with the alpha release of ECK back in May 2019, the vision for ECK is to provide an official way to orchestrate Elasticsearch on Kubernetes and provide a SaaS-like experience for Elastic products on Kubernetes. Kubernetes has continued to grow in popularity and has become the standard for orchestrating container workloads, and Elastic has seen a growing number of users deploying the Elastic Stack on Kubernetes. Elastic has already taken a number of steps to support container workloads, such as releasing official Docker images for Elasticsearch and Kibana, joining the CNCF, and launching Elastic Helm charts. Bringing ECK into general availability is the exciting next step on this journey.

The initial alpha release of ECK built on Elastic’s years of operational knowledge gained from creating Elasticsearch and Elastic Cloud Enterprise and running the Elasticsearch Service. The community reception to the first alpha release (and the three early access releases that followed) has been extremely positive, and with the general availability of ECK Elastic offers users a production-ready solution to deploy and streamline the operation of the Elastic Stack on Kubernetes.

Day 2 operations simplified

When it comes to deploying software, day 1 is easy; day 2 is more challenging. Built on the Kubernetes Operator pattern, ECK simplifies many day 2 operations – such as scaling, upgrades, and configuration management – when managing one or more deployments of the Elastic Stack on Kubernetes. This reduced operational burden lets users focus on their business requirements and reduces time to value from the Elastic Stack.

Notable features include:

• Deploy and manage multiple Elasticsearch clusters, including Kibana
• Seamless upgrades to new versions of the Elastic Stack
• Simple scaling that allows you to grow with your use cases
• Default security on every cluster

As the creators of Elasticsearch and the rest of the Elastic Stack, Elastic wants ECK to be the best solution for users looking to orchestrate Elasticsearch on Kubernetes. Many users have validated this during the alpha/beta cycles.

“As an early adopter of both Kubernetes and Elastic, we’ve been excited about testing Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) as it will allow us to streamline our processes for building and operating Elasticsearch on Kubernetes,” said Michael Lorant, Principal Systems Engineer at Nine, Australia’s largest locally owned media company. “With the release of ECK 1.0 GA, we are looking forward to getting the best features of the Elastic Stack including the infrastructure UI that provides detailed visibility of our Kubernetes environment. We are excited to explore further usage of ECK and Elastic for Kubernetes as it aligns with our strategy of complete application and cluster observability.”

Curated solutions and exclusive features

ECK gives users the complete Elastic experience on Kubernetes, including features and capabilities that you can only get from Elastic – such as APM, Logs, Metrics, SIEM, Canvas, Lens, machine learning, and index lifecycle management. All clusters deployed via ECK include these capabilities. Support for advanced topologies through features like dedicated master and machine learning nodes and hot-warm-cold deployments lets users optimize their deployments further for observability and security use cases.

Elastic has released the core ECK functionality under the free-forever Basic tier to make these exclusive features and capabilities available to all users, no matter where they deploy Elastic products. Users can also access more advanced features through Elastic’s Enterprise Subscription.

Getting started

ECK is built for flexibility and runs on a variety of Kubernetes platforms, including Google Kubernetes Engine, Red Hat OpenShift, Azure Kubernetes Service, Amazon Kubernetes Service, and vanilla Kubernetes.

It’s also super simple to get started. With a one-line command, you can deploy ECK into your Kubernetes environment and start creating clusters in a few minutes. For instructions and more details, be sure to check out the ECK quickstart page.

Use the Elastic Stack to monitor Kubernetes

The Elastic and Kubernetes story extends well beyond just running the Elastic Stack on Kubernetes. The Elastic Stack can also be used to provide comprehensive observability and security capabilities for Kubernetes and its ecosystem:

• Gain observability in your Kubernetes environment by collecting logs, metrics, and APM data
• Integrate Envoy proxy and CoreDNS into Elastic SIEM

What’s next?

With the release of ECK 1.0, users now have a strong foundation to start deploying and managing the Elastic Stack on Kubernetes. Elastic will continue to build richer experiences on top of ECK, such as a dedicated UI, first-party API, autoscaling, and more.