Deploy
Whether you're planning to use Elastic's pre-built solutions or Serverless projects, build your own applications with Elasticsearch, or analyze your data using Kibana tools, you'll need to deploy Elastic first.
This page will help you understand your deployment options and choose the approach that best fits your needs.
Every Elastic deployment requires Elasticsearch as its core data store and search/analytics engine.
Additionally, Kibana provides the user interface for all Elastic solutions and Serverless projects. It is required for most use cases, from data exploration to monitoring and security analysis.
Your choice of deployment type determines how you'll set up and manage these core components, plus any additional components you need.
Learn more about the Elastic Stack to understand the core and optional components of an Elastic deployment.
Quick start options
- Elastic Cloud: Get a hosted solution up and running in minutes.
- Elastic Cloud Hosted: Our hosted Elastic Stack offering, deployed in the cloud with your provider of choice. Sign up for a 14-day free trial.
- Elastic Cloud Serverless: Create serverless projects for autoscaled and fully managed Elastic deployments. Sign up for a 14-day free trial.
- Local development: Get started quickly with Elasticsearch and Kibana in Docker for local development and testing.
Advanced options
- Self-managed: Install, configure, and run Elastic on your own premises.
- Elastic Cloud Enterprise: Deploy Elastic Cloud on public or private clouds, virtual machines, or your own premises.
- Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes: Deploy Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes.
If you want to focus on using Elastic products rather than managing infrastructure, choose:
- Serverless: Zero operational overhead, automatic scaling and updates, latest features
- Cloud hosted: Balance of control and managed operations, choice of resources and regions
If you need to run Elastic on your infrastructure, choose between a fully self-managed deployment or using an orchestrator:
- Fully self-managed: Complete control and responsibility for your Elastic deployment
- With orchestration:
- Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK): If you need Kubernetes-native orchestration
- Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE): If you need a multi-tenant orchestration platform
About orchestration
An orchestrator automates the deployment and management of multiple Elastic clusters, handling tasks like scaling, upgrades, and monitoring.
Consider orchestration if you:
- Need to manage multiple Elastic clusters
- Want automated operations at scale
- Have a Kubernetes environment (ECK)
- Need to build a multi-tenant platform (ECE)
Orchestrators manage the lifecycle of your Elastic deployments but don't change how the core products work. When using ECK or ECE:
- You'll still use the same Elasticsearch and Kibana features and configurations
- Most product documentation remains applicable
- You can add other Elastic products as needed
- The orchestrator handles operational tasks while you focus on using and configuring the products
Documentation will specify when certain features or configurations are not applicable to specific deployment types.
In Elastic Cloud Serverless, you automatically get access to the latest versions of Elastic features and you don't need to manage version compatibility.
With other deployment types (Elastic Cloud Hosted, ECE, and ECK), you control which Elastic Stack versions you deploy and when you upgrade. The ECE and ECK orchestrators themselves also receive regular version updates, independent of the Elastic Stack versions they manage.
Consider this when choosing your deployment type:
- Choose Serverless if you want automatic access to the latest features and don't want to manage version compatibility
- Choose other deployment types if you need more control over version management
Learn more about versioning and availability.
- Serverless: Pay for what you use
- Cloud hosted: Subscription-based with resource allocation
- Self-hosted options: Infrastructure costs plus operational overhead mean a higher total cost of ownership (TCO)
For a detailed comparison of features and capabilities across deployment types, see the Deployment comparison reference.