a9s Elasticsearch

This documentation describes the a9s Elasticsearch service. a9s Elasticsearch enables on-demand provisioning of VM-based, dedicated Elasticsearch servers and clusters. Developers can create instances of an Elasticsearch server or cluster using Apps Manager or the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (cf CLI) and bind these instances to an application. Depending on your service plan, a service instance may be associated with a single, dedicated VM or a set of VMs consisting of multiple VMs containing an Elasticsearch replica set cluster.

Overview

When you run the cf CLI cf create-service a9s-elasticsearch command, BOSH creates dedicated VMs for this service instance. This allows the best possible bad neighborhood protection.

Elasticsearch service instance provisioning, including VM orchestration, is entirely automated. This enables service instances to be highly isolated and shielded by infrastructure virtualization mechanisms.

Due to the on-demand provisioning on VMs, only existing service instances allocate infrastructure resources. These resources are released when service instances are destroyed. Using on-demand provisioning the number of service instances is not limited by design.

Distributed across multiple infrastructure availability zones, clustered data service plans enable short failover times and are resilient against failures of individual infrastructure hosts or entire availability zones.

Current Features

The current version of a9s Elasticsearch includes the following key features:

Feature	Benefit
On­-Demand Service Instance Provisioning	a9s Elasticsearch deploys Elasticsearch instances automatically. Developers can provision a single-VM Elasticsearch server or a multi-VM Elasticsearch Replica Set using a single command.
Service Instance Isolation	Each Elasticsearch server runs on a dedicated VM to ensure bad neighborhood protection in order to be aligned with enterprise security requirements. a9s Elasticsearch uses Cloud Foundry security groups to prevent network connections being established by unauthorized applications.
High Availability	a9s Elasticsearch ensures high-availability. The Consul-based internal DNS system ensures that the connected application always connects to a working node.
Smoke Tests	a9s Elasticsearch contains a post-deploy smoke tests errand that runs a series of basic tests against your installation to ensure that it is configured properly.
Service Instance Capacity Upgrade	Cloud Foundry Service Plan updates allow upgrades to the RAM, CPU and storage capacity for your Elasticsearch instances.
Logging and Monitoring	Each Elasticsearch service instance provides log messages and Elasticsearch-specific metrics to one or more syslog/graphite endpoints. You can configure the syslog/graphite endpoint to receive logging and monitoring information.
Deployment Updater	This errand automatically updates the stemcell and all provisioned a9s Elasticsearch service instances to their lastest version.
Backup Manager	The Backup Manager does regular backups of your instances and offers endpoints to backup and restore backups instantly.
Service Guard	The Service Guard creates Cloud Foundry security groups for your service instance VMs. When the IP address of a service instance changes, the guard updates the security group.