Elastic unveils new AI-powered serverless cloud service

Elastic has announced the general availability of Elastic Cloud Serverless, combining a new architecture with advanced AI capabilities.

Elastic Cloud Serverless features a re-architected Elasticsearch and the industry-first Search AI Lake, designed for real-time applications that demand high storage capacity and low-latency querying. This service aims to efficiently support applications such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and threat detection through seamless scalability and flexible, usage-based pricing.

Maribel Lopez, Founder & Principal Analyst of Lopez Research, highlighted the importance of scalability in search applications, noting, "The need for scalability within search has never been more prevalent. Serverless architecture supports the development of AI-powered search applications because it offers significant benefits in terms of scalability, cost-efficiency, and flexibility for modern software development. Companies need this type of architectural flexibility to navigate a rapidly changing AI landscape without having to make scale or performance trade-offs."

Elastic Cloud Serverless improves performance by decoupling compute from storage and indexing from search while using cost-effective cloud-native object storage. This ensures high-speed, low-latency querying and AI relevance, meeting the requirements of complex and high-performance workloads.

Madison Bahmer, Senior Principal Enterprise Architect at Two Six Technologies, commented on the performance, "Ingesting data and querying the cluster showed nearly zero latency using Elastic Cloud Serverless. It is really fast and extremely easy to set up; we provisioned a new project without needing technical expertise."

The service's pricing model is based on actual usage, tailored for security, observability, and search needs.

By focusing on metrics like data ingestion, storage, and compute units, Elastic allows easier management of budgets and scaling. The introduction of tiered pricing further simplifies scaling by reducing costs as data usage increases.

Elastic also offers specific serverless solutions to cater to diverse needs. Elasticsearch Serverless helps developers quickly build AI-powered search applications, Elastic Observability Serverless provides a managed experience without the burden of infrastructure management, and Elastic Security Serverless offers a new option for security analytics and SIEM functionalities.

Marcel Makus, Development Manager at SAP Concur, praised the service for ease of use, "What has stood out to our team with Elasticsearch Serverless is its ease of use. Elasticsearch Serverless is simple to use as a fully managed service, and it takes virtually no time to set up a new project. We've also been impressed with how well Elastic delivers on its autoscaling capabilities."

Ken Exner, Chief Product Officer at Elastic, discussed the service's benefits, "With our fully managed Elastic Cloud Serverless, we're helping customers save more, scale fast, and search faster."

"By removing operational overhead, developers can rapidly build AI-powered search applications without concern for latency or scalability. Our Search AI Lake inherently supports dense vectors and features such as hybrid search, faceted search, and relevance ranking, which are especially vital for applications like GenAI and RAG."

Currently, Elastic Cloud Serverless is available on AWS, with plans to support Azure and Google Cloud instances in early 2025, facilitating integration with those cloud ecosystems and their respective services.