Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES)

Amazon Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) is an Amazon Web Services product that allows developers to launch and operate Elasticsearch -- an open-source, Java-based search and analytics engine -- in the AWS cloud. Developers can use Elasticsearch in AWS to monitor cloud-based applications in real time and access log and clickstream analytics.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service is accessed through the AWS Management Console, the command-line interface or the AWS software development kit.

Using the service, developers can scale, update and manage Elasticsearch clusters, which are called domains. Users specify the compute and storage needed -- instances, instance types and Elastic Block Store volumes -- for each domain. Developers can add and remove instances to accommodate data growth, or set the service to scale up or down based on defined thresholds. Amazon CloudWatch provides several performance metrics to monitor Elasticsearch domain health.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service integrates with Logstash and Kibana, an open source data ingestion engine and an open source analytics and visualization tool, respectively. The service eases the setup of ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) clusters, as each individual product combines to form a composite log management service.

Administrators can configure access to domains using AWS Identity and Access Management policies. AWS CloudTrail can monitor and audit domains as well as log API calls made with the service. Developers can select the Zones Awareness option to automatically distribute domains across two availability zones, ultimately improving availability.