Elasticsearch is a powerful open source search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. It provides distributed indexing and low-latency search of JSON documents, making it ideal for real-time analytics and full-text search across large datasets.

Thanks to its schema‑flexible design and a responsive REST API combined with built‑in sharding and replication, Elasticsearch can scale horizontally by adding more nodes. It also forms the core of the popular Elastic Stack, where Kibana, Beats and Logstash add visualization and data/log collection.

With support for vector search, advanced relevance algorithms, and integrations for retrieval-augmented workflows, Elasticsearch is used both as an enterprise AI data platform and as the technical backbone for use cases ranging from log management to product and site search.