#4 The future ahead is promising!
In the previous post, some of La Redoute‘s experiences while using Elastic stack have been explained and one can say that we have achieved some organizational and technical maturity, as today La Redoute has some people specializing on the Elastic stack and we have a better understanding on how to use these components.
So, what does the future hold??
In a span of three years, from 2019 to 2021, Las Redoute is expecting to complete the ongoing projects: the migration and upgrade of our ElasticSearch clusters; the activation of the security features for the offers cluster; and to complete a project that aims to optimize the customer search process (similar to offers, i.e., a specific index will be created to minimize the queries done to get customer info).
Additionally, the integration of the Elastic, Logstash and Kibana (ELK) components in multi-cloud platforms is in progress, and the next step is to have them available in hybrid-clouds. In 2021, La Redoute wants to provide the teams with quick and easy access to ELK components; it will be achieved by providing them as a service - ELKaaS. But first, we expect to have ElasticSearch on-demand via integration with our Kubernetes (K8s) infra, and then, with our streaming platform (Apache Kafka).
Moreover, the integration of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is also in the plans and it will provide the team with insightful info about the execution of an application. The usage of Machine Learning (ML) for prediction is also part of La Redoute’s digital strategy.
Transversely, there is a need to disseminate the knowledge and best practices and to have all business areas and domains implementing their own set of functional and technical metrics.
#5 Elastic Roadmap 6.5+ 7.0 is here!
A new major release was launched a few days before the meetup, so the title became obsolete. No problem at all! We were able to see an amazing set of new features from the release 7.x presented by João and Tiago. The one that everyone must recall (sorry João!), also because it was demonstrated live by Tiago, was the Canvas tool, which allows the creation of presentations and reports that are connected with live data stored in the ElasticSearch.
Besides all the technical aspects, we have learned that anyone can be an active part of the Elastic community!
Do you know how?
You may register as an Elastic Pioneer and test the new features in first-hand. With the feedback of the pioneers, the quality of new releases is for sure improved.
#6 Creative data showcases with Canvas: a cool way to analyse your data.
This lesson presents you a high-level overview about Canvas. The following tagline for this tool is: Showcase Your Data, Live & Pixel-Perfect!
The templates available in Canvas have attractive and modern designs while being user-friendly. The most innovative and appealing characteristic of all resides on the fact that the data is live! Data in Canvas presentations are not static, as it happens with the typical slides that La Redoute uses in presentations and reports.
Reporting tasks are also facilitated, citing the official site: « Goodbye copy-paste ». It means that La Redoute can build generic charts or reports (build once) and have them shipped with the frequency that we want (weekly, monthly), and the best part is the data will be up to date.
The demo was particularly interesting for the La Redoute team, since Tiago used our company as the use case for the demo, presenting live data modifications through the template displayed in the image below. Tiago also demonstrated two features that caught special attention of the IT-crowd in the audience. First, it is possible to use SQL syntax to access data in ElasticSearch, to build aggregations and to shape the data as we want (Elasticsearch SQL is a major feature of the new release 7.x). And, secondly, we can use a « pipeline-based expression language » to customize the extraction and functions applied to the data.
To check the Canvas feature in more detail, here’s the official link.
