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Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes

ECK

Built on the Kubernetes Operator pattern, Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) extends the basic Kubernetes orchestration capabilities to support the setup and management of Elasticsearch, Kibana, APM Server, Beats, Elastic Agent, Elastic Maps Server, and Logstash on Kubernetes.

With Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, you can streamline critical operations, such as:

  1. Managing and monitoring multiple clusters
  2. Scaling cluster capacity and storage
  3. Performing safe configuration changes through rolling upgrades
  4. Securing clusters with TLS certificates
  5. Setting up hot-warm-cold architectures with availability zone awareness

This section provides everything you need to install, configure, and manage Elastic Stack applications with ECK, including:

  • Deploy an orchestrator: ECK installation methods and configuration options. Deploy ECK on managed Kubernetes platforms like GKE, AKS, and EKS, on self-managed Kubernetes clusters, on OpenShift, and even in air-gapped environments.
  • Manage deployments: Handle Elasticsearch clusters and Kibana instances through ECK.
  • Orchestrate other Elastic applications: Run APM Server, Beats, Elastic Agent, Elastic Maps Server, and Logstash on Kubernetes.
  • Tools and APIs: A collection of tools and APIs available in ECK based environments.

Other sections of the documentation include the following important topics around ECK:

  • Logging and Monitoring: Configure stack monitoring and logs forwarding with the help of ECK.
  • Remote Clusters: Configure remote clusters on ECK.
  • Backup, high availability, and resilience tools: Add snapshot repositories to your Elasticsearch clusters for automatic snapshots.
  • Security: Secure communications, manage HTTP certificates, or add secure settings to your applications.
  • Users and Roles: Configure authentication and authorization mechanisms, built-in users, external providers, and more.
  • Autoscaling: Learn how to use Elasticsearch autoscaling on ECK, or use Horizontal Pod Autoscaler functionality for stateless workloads.
  • Licensing: Manage licenses on ECK.
Important

ECK is an Elastic self-managed product offered in two licensing tiers: Basic and Enterprise. For more details refer to Elastic subscriptions and Manage your license in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes documentation.

If you want to get started quickly, follow these guides to deploy ECK and set up an Elasticsearch cluster:

Afterwards, you can:

This section outlines the supported Kubernetes and Elastic Stack versions for ECK. Check the full Elastic support matrix for more information.

ECK is compatible with the following Kubernetes distributions and related technologies:

  • Kubernetes 1.28-1.32
  • OpenShift 4.13-4.18
  • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
  • Helm: 3.2.0+

ECK should work with all conformant installers listed in these FAQs. Distributions include source patches and so may not work as-is with ECK.

Alpha, beta, and stable API versions follow the same conventions used by Kubernetes.

ECK is compatible with the following Elastic Stack applications:

  • Elasticsearch, Kibana, APM Server: 6.8+, 7.1+, 8+
  • Enterprise Search: 7.7+, 8+
  • Beats: 7.0+, 8+
  • Elastic Agent: 7.10+ (standalone), 7.14+ (Fleet), 8+
  • Elastic Maps Server: 7.11+, 8+
  • Logstash: 8.7+

Elastic Stack application images for the OpenShift-certified Elasticsearch (ECK) Operator are only available from version 7.10 and later.