Elastic N.V. today announced the general availability of Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, or ECK, a version of its popular data management toolkit designed specially to run on the container orchestration framework.

The Mountain View, California-based company is the developer of Elasticsearch, an open-source search engine enterprises use to make internal records more easily discoverable.

Over the years, Elastic has built out a stable of complementary tools around the platform. These include the Beats and Logstash applications for pulling records into Elasticsearch, as well as the Kibana data visualizer.

The four tools form the core of ECK. Elastic has added on a number of Kubernetes-optimized features designed to simplify the day-to-day management of enterprise deployments.

ECK enables administrators to set configuration settings centrally across a Elasticsearch cluster, or across multiple clusters if their company makes heavier use of the search engine, and there’s dedicated a tool for scaling capacity up and down. Also included are monitoring capabilities and a built-in backup scheduling mechanism. 

A smaller but nonetheless significant feature shipping with ECK is a set of default settings meant to reduce the risk of data breaches. “All Elasticsearch clusters launched on ECK are secure by default, which means they have encryption enabled and are protected with a strong default password right at creation time,” Anurag Gupta, an Elastic product manager, detailed when the company debuted the initial alpha version of ECK last year.

The past 12 months witnessed a string of high-profile breaches in which insecure Elasticsearch clusters exposed user data because of configuration issues. By defining certain key configuration settings out of the box, Elastic can mitigate the risk of human error while making its platform more attractive for security-conscious enterprises.

Keeping to the spirit of software containers, ECK works in a variety of environments. Companies can deploy the platform on their on-premises Kubernetes clusters or in Red Hat OpenShift, Amazon Kubernetes Service, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Kubernetes Service and Google Kubernetes Engine. 

Elastic rival Lucidworks Inc. has embraced the container orchestration framework as well. The company, which raised $100 million in funding last April, sells an enterprise search engine called Fusion that’s based on the popular Solr open-source project. Like ECK, Fusion can run on the managed Kubernetes services of all three major cloud providers.

Photo: Elastic