Amazon Adds Open Source Elasticsearch Platform to AWS Cloud

Elasticsearch, the open source, distributed big data analytics platform, is at the center of Amazon's (AMZN) newest AWS cloud service, Amazon Elasticsearch Search, which the company rolled out this week.

Elasticsearch is a Java-based open source framework for searching textual documents on a massive scale. It is designed to be highly scalable and compatible with cluster-based distributed-computing infrastructure.

The platform also has a rich API and web interface integration, which makes it an obvious choice for Amazon in building its newest cloud service. Now, the company offers user-friendly Elasticsearch clusters through the AWS interface.

"You can launch a scalable Elasticsearch cluster from the AWS Management Console in minutes, point your client at the cluster’s endpoint, and start to load, process, analyze, and visualize data shortly thereafter," AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post introducing the service.

Elasticsearch isn't a new technology. It has been around since 2010. And Amazon isn't the first company to offer convenient, cloud-based Elasticsearch clusters. Google (GOOG) also offers "Click to Deploy Elasticsearch" on Google Compute Engine.

Still, Elasticsearch on AWS adds another product to Amazon's portfolio of cloud offerings. It also makes it that much easier for organizations to take advantage of Elasticsearch, an open source technology whose relevance will only grow as big data becomes increasingly important to the market.