What is Elasticsearch? Why do I need it?

Elasticsearch is a NOSQL, distributed full text database. Which means that this database is document based instead of using tables or schema, we use documents… lots and lots of documents. The project was started in 2010 by Shay Banon. Shay wanted to create a storage and search engine that would be easy to operate. Elasticsearch is based on the Lucene engine on top of which Shay added an http rest interface which resulted in a distributed search engine that is incredibly easy to scale and returns results at lightning speed. Read more