Add plugins and extensions in Elastic Cloud Hosted

On Elastic Cloud Hosted, you extend the core functionality of Elasticsearch with plugins or bundles. In the Elastic Cloud console and API, both are referred to as extensions.

Plugins

Plugins are software packages that you install in Elasticsearch to extend its core functionality to include additional analyzers, discovery providers, or ingest processors. Availability depends on your Elasticsearch version. Common categories include:

Discovery plugins, such as the cloud AWS plugin that allows discovering nodes on EC2 instances.
Analysis plugins, to provide analyzers targeted at languages other than English.
Scripting plugins, to provide additional scripting languages.

You can add plugins to a deployment in one of two ways, depending on whether Elastic Cloud provides the plugin or you supply it yourself:

Provided with Elastic Cloud Hosted: Elastic Cloud hosts compatible official plugins for your Elasticsearch version and upgrades them with your deployment, except when there are breaking changes. You enable the plugins per deployment. To learn about official and community plugins, refer to Elasticsearch plugins.
Custom plugins: When you need to install an official plugin not included with Elastic Cloud Hosted, such as a community-sourced plugin, or one you write yourself, you upload a custom plugin. Uploading custom plugins requires a Gold, Platinum, or Enterprise subscription.

Plugins are not supported for Kibana. To learn more, check Restrictions for Elasticsearch and Kibana plugins.

Bundles

Bundles are ZIP files of configuration and data files. They are not installed as plugins. Instead, when a node starts, Elastic Cloud extracts the bundle contents into each node's /app/config configuration directory.

Use a bundle when every node needs the same files, such as:

Synonym, stop-word, or compound-word dictionaries
Scripts referenced in queries
Cluster configuration files, such as SAML metadata

Bundles use the same extensions workflow as custom plugins where you upload a ZIP file, choose the bundle type, and then enable the extension on your deployment. The difference happens at runtime: plugins are installed into Elasticsearch while bundles are extracted as files on disk.

All subscription levels, including Standard, can upload scripts and dictionaries. To prepare, upload, and enable a bundle, refer to Upload custom plugins and bundles.

Manage through the API

To create, update, enable, or delete extensions programmatically, refer to Managing plugins and extensions through the API.