Elastic Debuts Elastic 8.0 With Enterprise Search Enhancements

Elastic, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company behind Elasticsearch, has announced the general availability of Elastic 8.0. The latest version of the platform includes enhancements across the Elastic Search Platform and its Enterprise Search, Observability and Security solutions. Updates include native vector search, native support for modern natural language processing models, data onboarding and a streamlined security experience.

Elastic 8.0 also includes:

• Delivering native support for natural language processing (NLP) models and vector search with approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) capabilities
• Protecting customer data from unauthorized access with a new, simplified security by default framework
• Introducing a simplified Elastic Cloud on AWS onboarding experience and new integrations to speed data ingestion

Native support for natural language processing (NLP), now generally available, enables the use of custom or third-party PyTorch machine learning models directly in Elasticsearch. The addition of native NLP support with vector search enables users to perform inference within Elasticsearch.

Customers can also now leverage enhanced vector search capabilities, including the general availability of native support for approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search. This allows them to perform queries on data sets such as documents, images, audio files and more.

Additionally, expanded security features across the Elastic Search Platform include new default security settings to secure data, network and user information in self-managed clusters. Elastic 8.0 also includes auto-generated tokens and certificates.

The Elastic Cloud on AWS onboarding experience includes new integrations to speed data ingestion, including the new Elastic Serverless Forwarder. It is designed as an AWS Lambda application and is published in the AWS Serverless Application Repository. Company officials promise the Elastic Serverless Forwarder will simplify architectures and streamline data ingestion.