How Netflix Leverages Elasticsearch for Operational Intelligence
Elasticsearch is a popular open-source search and analytics engine that enables powerful log analytics and real-time data insights. Here's a quick overview of some of its key capabilities:
- Document-oriented storage allowing flexible schemas for diverse data types
- Distributed and scalable architecture for handling huge volumes of data
- Fast and advanced full-text search along with aggregation analytics
- REST APIs for easy integration and horizontal scalability
- Pluggable integrations for ingesting data from disparate sources
With these features, Elasticsearch is commonly used for log analysis, operational monitoring, application performance management, and data visualization.
Explosive Growth of Elasticsearch at Netflix
Elasticsearch has seen massive adoption at Netflix over the last two years. Here are some stats:
- Over 150 Elasticsearch clusters with ~3,500 instances
- Managing over 1.3 petabytes of operational and monitoring data
- Majority of data ingested via Netflix's internal data pipeline
This reflects how mission-critical Elasticsearch has become for managing Netflix's enormous scale.