Getting Started with Elasticsearch Installation — The Complete Guide

A complete guide for landing a working Elasticsearch 7.9 server from scratch to a secured, multi-node cluster exposed to internet with sample data.

Introduction

Getting started with Elasticsearch is quite easy as there are several brilliant pre-built solutions giving a quick and convenient approach to land a working Elasticsearch instance in minutes. However if we would like to achieve something more, it can get quite quickly really tricky.

On what we will focus now is how to build an Elasticsearch platform with multiple nodes, exposed to internet, with working Snapshots and Backups, secured with SSL and basic authentication.

Before getting started, let’s have a little bit of background.

My journey with Elasticsearch started with Algolia (not really Elastic, its more like a search-as a service solution with a great API), then evolved to Bitnami Stack which provides pre-built, pre-configured, out of the box working Elastic VMs on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, later on trialing with Elastic Cloud services then finally ended up with a completely self managed approach — running Linux VMs on Google Cloud and Azure platforms with native Elasticsearch installed.

The reasoning behind ending up with the self managed approach is that despite the pros and great functionalities of all the alternatives — this provides the highest flexibility in terms of configuration…