Posted On: Aug 15, 2019
Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch versions 6.8 and 7.1 and their corresponding Kibana versions. Elasticsearch 6.8 is the final minor 6.x release and is the upgrade path for 7.x. Elasticsearch 7.1 is a major release and provides improved resiliency and scalability, and more efficient query processing.
To improve resiliency and scalability, Elasticsearch has added a new cluster coordination system, which significantly reduces the time required for master election and implements new safeguards when quorum is lost.
To provide more efficient and performant query processing, Elasticsearch 7.1 includes adaptive replica selection by default which automatically routes requests based on load and performance of the available shards. Query processing is also improved by the implementation of a faster retrieval algorithm. This algorithm optimizes search performance by skipping low ranking records when there are a large number of matches — quickly providing the top hits.
You can now create new domains running Elasticsearch 6.8 or 7.1 and also easily upgrade existing 5.x and 6.x domains with no downtime using in-place version upgrades.
Both the Elasticsearch 6.8 and 7.1 releases also include updates to the previously released Alerting and SQL support features. Both Alerting and SQL support are components of Open Distro for Elasticsearch, an Apache 2.0-licensed distribution of Elasticsearch.