Press release

Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE) 2.2 Now Available

businesswire,
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Sponsored by Businesswire

Elastic N.V. (NYSE: ESTC), the company behind Elasticsearch and the
Elastic Stack, announces the release of version 2.2 of Elastic Cloud
Enterprise (ECE). This release focuses on bringing many of the recent
Elastic Stack features to ECE in a more native way and providing better
security and user management capabilities in multitenant environments.
Elastic Cloud Enterprise version 2.2 is immediately available for
download at elastic.co.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here:
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190410005739/en/

(Photo: Business Wire)

(Photo: Business Wire)

Cross-Cluster Search UI

ECE makes it easy to centrally provision and manage many clusters, which
simplifies the best practice of having a cluster per tenant or use case
rather than large multitenant clusters. While this multi-cluster
approach is clearly better for each user — they have their own
environment that can be easily upgraded on their schedule, no noisy
neighbor effects, etc. — there are often benefits to being able to look
across multiple users and clusters.

To address this need for searching across clusters, ECE has included a dedicated
cross-cluster search API since version 2.1. Version 2.2 takes this
cross-cluster search (CCS) capability further by providing a slick UI to
manage the CCS workflow as a native, first-class deployment template.
The CCS UI lets users easily configure a CCS deployment that can search
across several or even all of the deployments managed by ECE in a secure
and efficient way. Once the CCS deployment is defined, ECE takes care of
all the underlying plumbing to make sure your deployments are configured
securely and efficiently for CCS.

Role-Based Access Control (Beta)

ECE has always made security a priority, from end-to-end encrypted
communications to a wide array of supported authentication types for
managed clusters.

ECE 2.2 takes this security-first approach to the next level, providing
the ability to create users, audit their interactions with the platform,
and assign them with predefined roles for more fine-grained control over
access to the ECE environment.

Role-based access control is introduced as a beta feature in ECE 2.2 and
supports one or more of the following pre-configured roles:

  • Platform admin: the almighty superuser; identical permission to
    the admin user in previous ECE versions.
  • Platform viewer: view-only permissions for the entire platform
    and hosted deployments; identical permissions to the read-only user in
    previous ECE versions.
  • Deployments manager: allows users to create and manage
    deployments on the platform, but does not allow them to access any
    platform level operations and resources such as deployment templates,
    instance configurations, allocators, etc.
  • Deployments viewer: allows users to view only deployments,
    without the ability to operate on them in any way.

In addition, users are also able to configure ECE to authenticate users
against a SAML identity provider or an LDAP server, and map users in
these user registries to the above roles.

The addition of role-based access control to ECE is another step in
making ECE more secure. Future versions will include support for custom
roles and the ability to define teams and segregate resources across
these teams.

Integration with Index Lifecycle Management

In Elastic Stack version 6.7, Elastic introduced a much-awaited feature: index
lifecycle management (ILM). With ILM, users can automate the
management of indices over their lifetime, and automatically apply
operations such as index relocation to a different node, force merging
and shrinking an index, or deleting it at different phases in its
lifecycle.

Previous versions of ECE baked a more rudimentary index
curation functionality into the relevant deployment templates such
as hot-warm. In version 2.2, new clusters now leverage the more
sophisticated and feature-rich index lifecycle management provided by
the Elastic Stack, and implement things like index shrinking, force
merging, and even deletion.

Elasticsearch Keystore Support

Keystore is an Elasticsearch tool that allows users to securely store
sensitive settings such as credentials for blob store repositories
accessed from within Elasticsearch. These include AWS S3, Azure Blob
Storage, and Google Cloud Storage.

With ECE 2.2, users now have API and UI access to create and store
secure settings to an Elasticsearch keystore, and ECE makes sure that
these settings are always available to cluster nodes, regardless of
their location, which allows ECE users to configure various
Elasticsearch plugins more securely.

All New Ansible Playbooks

One of the more common requests from ECE users was to be able to install
and manage ECE installation with popular configuration management and
infrastructure-as-code tools. ECE version 2.2 includes a number of Ansible
playbooks to install and manage ECE more easily.

Ready for 7.0

ECE 2.2 is ready for the Elastic Stack version 7.0, which was also
released today. Greenfield ECE 2.2 installations will include version
7.0 of the stack automatically, and ECE users who upgraded from earlier
versions can simply add
the 7.0 stack pack to their environment and upgrade their clusters
to 7.0.

Another important improvement is that ECE 2.2 will support a rolling
upgrading from 6.7 to 7.0, without incurring any downtime — a major
version upgrade with zero downtime.

Additional Improvements

In addition to all the above, ECE 2.2 also includes several enhancements
that improve scalability and usability:

  • Performance and stability improvements due to more efficient use of
    ZooKeeper, which is the heart of the ECE distributed state and
    coordination layer. These improvements are achieved by significantly
    reducing the number of connections to ZooKeeper. Clusters from version
    6.7 onwards will no longer connect directly to ZooKeeper for any
    purpose, effectively making the platform much more scalable.
  • System clusters have been upgraded to version 6.6, which allows users
    to use the new infrastructure
    monitoring     and logging
    apps in Kibana to monitor and view logs and metrics of ECE hosts and
    containers.

Learn More

About Elastic

Elastic is a search company. As the creators of the Elastic Stack
(Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash), Elastic builds
self-managed and SaaS offerings that make data usable in real time and
at scale for use cases like application search, site search, enterprise
search, logging, APM, metrics, security, business analytics, and many
more.

Elastic and associated marks are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Elastic N.V. and its subsidiaries. All other company and
product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.