Strange Loop

2009 - 2023

/

St. Louis, MO

Getting Started with Elasticsearch

This 3 hour workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to Elasticsearch, an increasingly popular search and analytics engine with support for full-text search, dynamic type mapping, faceting, geospatial querying and built-in horizontal scalability. Elasticsearch runs on the JVM and is built on top of the powerful Lucene library, supporting interaction via its REST API, JVM transport, Thrift, and Memcached.

This workshop will focus primarily on interacting with Elasticsearch via its REST API. We will use Sense (a web-based front end to Elasticsearch) to demonstrate various mapping, indexing and query techniques across several real-world data sets. By the end of the workshop, each attendee should have a basic understanding of the following concepts:

Attendees should bring their laptops. We will be working through the examples using a Vagrant/Puppet environment which installs Elasticsearch, along with various plugins and datasets, on a virtual machine you can play along locally.

Cedric Hurst

Cedric Hurst

Cedric Hurst is Principal at Spantree Technology Group, a boutique software engineering firm in Chicago with a deep specialty in Elasticsearch and designing search-oriented user experiences. In addition to search, Cedric and the rest of the team focus on JVM languages, rules engines, devops-y things, and rich web and mobile interfaces using a variety of JavaScript frameworks. Within the next year, Spantree plans to combine this expertise into an open-source powered search appliance complete with a Nutch-based web crawler and configurable user-facing frontend. In his spare time, Cedric also speaks at technical meetups, makes music and mentors students.

Gary Turovsky

Gary Turovsky

Spantree Technology Group

Gary Turovsky is also a senior software engineer at Spantree Technology Group. He’s been working with Elasticsearch for a variety of clients for about 2 years now, guiding clients through tricky mapping and configuration issues and working with it as a backend for a few search applications.

Kevin Greene

Kevin Greene

Spantree Technology Group

Kevin Greene is a senior software engineer at Spantree Technology Group. He’s been working with Elasticsearch for about 2.5 years, utilizing it in financial applications, automatic schedulers, and any other project that needs effective visualizations and intuitive search.