What Is Amazon Elasticsearch Service?

If you're not already an AWS customer, create an account. If you already have an AWS account, you are automatically signed up for Amazon ES. Your AWS account enables you to access Amazon ES and other services in the AWS platform, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). There are no sign-up fees, and charges are not incurred until you create a domain. As with other AWS services, you pay only for the resources that you use.

You can use your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user name and password to sign in to the AWS Management Console if you have an account with the IAM service. IAM allows you to securely control access to AWS and resources in your AWS account.

You can access Amazon Elasticsearch Service through the Amazon Elasticsearch Service console, the AWS SDKs, or the AWS CLI.

For information about Elasticsearch APIs and features, see the Elasticsearch documentation.

Amazon ES provides regional endpoints for accessing the configuration API and domain-specific endpoints for accessing the search API. You use the configuration service to create and manage your domains. The region-specific configuration service endpoints are of the following form:

es.region.amazonaws.com

For example, es.us-east-1.amazonaws.com. For a list of supported regions, see Regions and Endpoints in the AWS General Reference.

Amazon ES provides a single service endpoint for both search and data services:

A domain's search endpoint is used to upload data and submit search requests.

A domain has one or more Elasticsearch instances, each with a finite amount of RAM, CPU, and storage resources for indexing data and processing requests. The number of Elasticsearch instances needed by a domain depends on the documents in your collection and the volume and complexity of your Elasticsearch requests. When you create a domain, you select an initial number of Elasticsearch instances and an instance type. However, these initial choices might not be adequate as the quantity and size of data increase and as Elasticsearch requests increase in number and complexity. You can accommodate the growth by scaling your Amazon ES domain using the guidelines in the following table.

If you use a programming language for which AWS provides an SDK, we recommend that you use the SDK to submit HTTP requests to AWS. All of the AWS SDKs greatly simplify the process of signing requests, and save you a significant amount of time when compared to natively accessing the Elasticsearch APIs. The SDKs integrate easily with your development environment and provide easy access to related commands. You can also use the Amazon ES console and AWS CLI to submit signed requests with no additional effort.

If you choose to call the Elasticsearch APIs directly, you must sign your own requests. Configuration service requests must always be signed. All requests must be signed unless you configure anonymous access for those services. Use the following procedure to sign a request:

Amazon ES supports authentication using AWS Signature Version 4. For more information, see Signature Version 4 Signing Process.

An instance type defines the memory, CPU, storage capacity, and hourly cost for an instance, the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that runs as a virtual server in the AWS Cloud. You should choose the instance type and the number of instances based on the anticipated size of the Elasticsearch indices, shards, and replicas that you intend to create on your cluster. Amazon ES supports the following instance types:

For more information, see Instance Types in the Amazon EC2 documentation.

You have the option of configuring your Amazon ES domain to use an Amazon EBS volume for storing indices rather than the default storage provided by the instance. An Amazon EBS volume is a durable, block-level storage device that you can attach to a single instance. Amazon ES supports the following EBS volume types:

For more information, see Amazon EBS Volumes in the Amazon EC2 documentation.

Amazon ES currently supports two Elasticsearch versions: 1.5 and 2.3. Compared to Elasticsearch version 1.5, version 2.3 offers improved performance, memory management, and security. It also offers several additional features, including the following:

For more information about the differences between Elasticsearch 1.5 and 2.3, see the Elasticsearch documentation. For information about the Elasticsearch APIs that Amazon ES supports for both 1.5 and 2.3, see Supported Elasticsearch Operations.

If you are starting a new Elasticsearch project, we strongly recommend that you choose version 2.3. If you have an existing 1.5 domain, you can choose to keep the domain or migrate your data to a new 2.3 domain. For more information, see Migrating Data in a Domain from Elasticsearch Version 1.5 to Version 2.3.

Amazon ES is commonly used with the following services:

Amazon ES integrates with the following services to provide data ingestion:

With Amazon Web Services, you pay only for what you use. For Amazon ES, you pay for each hour of use of an EC2 instance. You also have the option of paying for additional storage based on the cumulative size of EBS volumes attached to the data nodes in your domain.

If you qualify for the AWS Free Tier, you receive up to 750 hours per month of use with the t2.micro.elasticsearch instance type, as well as up to 10 GB of magnetic or general provisioned EBS storage. For more information, see AWS Free Tier.