Elastic, the search company, has released Elasticsearch 7.7.0. This release introduces asynchronous search, password protected keystore, performance improvement on time sorted queries, two new aggregates and a first release of packaging for ARM(non x86) platform.
Elasticsearch is a part of Elastic (ELK) Stack - Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash. With asynchronous search, the latest version allows users to retrieve results from an asynchronous search as they become available, thereby eliminating the wait for the final response only when the query is entirely finished.
This version appreciably reduces the amount of heap memory, leading to improved search and indexing performance. This also reduces costs by storing much more data per node before hitting memory limits.
The keystore can now be password protected for additional security. Elasticsearch uses a custom on-disk keystore for passwords and SSL certificates. The values are obscured by a hash, without any user-specific secret. While this is an optional feature, there won't be any new prompts if the already existing keystore has no password. Users must choose to password-protect the keystore in order to use this new feature.
With the release of Elasticsearch 7.7, search results will be faster when querying time-based indices. The entire shards will be filtered out if the shard doesn't contain any documents with relevant timestamps.
Two new aggregates - boxplot and top_metrics - are introduced. For a given dataset, boxplot aggregation will calculate the min, max and medium as well as the first and third quartiles. While resembling top_hits, the top_metrics aggregation will select a metric from a document according to largest or smallest sort value on a given, different field.
Painless, a secure scripting language introduced with Elasticsearch 5.0, has seen a great acceptance by users. The new Painless Lab will be available with Elasticsearch 7.7 in the Dev Tools section of Kibana. Users will be able to easily test out and debug their Painless scripts using the Painless Lab.
Transforms are now generally available, which include support for cross-cluster search. This allows users to create their destination index on a separate cluster from the source indices.
Elasticsearch 7.7 release is now supporting users working on non x86 platforms, with packages available for AArch64. For those running on Kubernetes cluster, official Helm charts for Elasticsearch are generally available.
Elasticsearch 7.7 is available for download and deployment via Elastic Service on Elastic Cloud. For additional information, there are release highlights with a complete list of updates.