Can I use Elasticsearch on Azure? Yes, indeed!

Today's post is about Elasticsearch and its support for Azure cloud. Can you run Elasticsearch on Azure? Yes, you can! There are two main approaches:

• Managed offering: Elasticsearch (Elastic Cloud) is available through the Azure Marketplace.
• Self-managed: your own Elasticsearch cluster can run on Azure virtual machines.

The managed option is easiest to get started with: Elastic handles cluster setup, scaling, and upgrades, and you connect to it with the usual Elasticsearch client libraries from .NET.

For self-managed clusters, more work is needed. The typical steps would include:

1. Create a the VMs (for example, Linux VMs) to run Elasticsearch.
2. Install Elasticsearch and configure node roles (master, data, or ingest).
3. Use Azure Load Balancer or Application Gateway in front of the cluster.
4. Store data on managed disks for durability.

From .NET/C# code, you can use the official NEST client to talk to Elasticsearch. As a quick example, it would look something like this:

var settings = new ConnectionSettings(new Uri("https://my-es.example.com"))
    .DefaultIndex("logs");

var client = new ElasticClient(settings);
var response = client.Search<LogEntry>(s => s
    .Query(q => q.MatchAll())
);

So if you like Elasticsearch's querying and indexing model, Azure is a good place to run it.