Amazon Web Services last week introduced Elasticsearch (Amazon ES) on the AWS cloud. The service adds yet another NoSQL-based Big Data analytics option to its ever-expanding roster of cloud services.

Elasticsearch is an open-source framework based on Java that’s designed to search through text-based documents at massive scale. The service uses native Java and RESTful APIs to enable automatic node routing. Elasticsearch is built atop of the old Apache Lucene indexing and search platform created by Hadoop inventor Dough Cutting, and is designed to be both highly scalable and compatible with distributed-computing infrastructure.

One notable feature of Elasticsearch is its rich API and Web interface integration, which means its an obvious candidate to become one of AWS’ services. As of last week, the cloud giant is offering user-friendly Elasticsearch clusters directly through its cloud 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,” wrote AWS’ Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post.

No doubt, few will be raving about Elasticsearch on AWS, given that it’s hardly anything new. The technology has been around since 2010 and has been available as a “Click to Deploy Elasticsearch” option on Google’s cloud for some time.

Nevertheless, it represents one more piece of the puzzle for AWS’s massive cloud portfolio. It also makes it easier for organizations that utilize AWS to get Elasticsearch up and running if they so desire, and that could be important in the long run, as Big Data technologies in general continue to grow in importance for the enterprise.

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