I recently had the opportunity to attend the ElasticON Public Sector UK, and it was fantastic. I’m not sure why I assumed it’d be on the side of rubbish, but it was anything but.
ElasticON Public Sector
Firstly, if you haven’t heard of Elastic, I’ll let them speak for themselves:
Elasticsearch is a distributed, free and open search and analytics engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured. Elasticsearch is built on Apache Lucene and was first released in 2010 by Elasticsearch N.V. (now known as Elastic). Known for its simple REST APIs, distributed nature, speed, and scalability, Elasticsearch is the central component of the Elastic Stack, a set of free and open tools for data ingestion, enrichment, storage, analysis, and visualization. Commonly referred to as the ELK Stack (after Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana), the Elastic Stack now includes a rich collection of lightweight shipping agents known as Beats for sending data to Elasticsearch.
If you haven’t heard of it, ElasticON Public Sector is a cool event put on by Elastic in London for the public sector.
Duh.
I’ve had exposure to Elastic through Umbraco CMS and recently the ELK stack for observability.
In my current role there is a focus on improving observability and monitoring, and we’ve recently procured a cloud instance of Elastic.
ElasticON was a perfect opportunity to hear, direct from Elastic and government peers, the latest on where they’re headed, why we should use it, and how we should use it best.
It’s clear Elastic has grown beyond “You know, for search.”
Coolest Bits I Didn’t Know About
I didn’t know a lot about Elastic, but these were the bits that stuck out to me.
SIEM
Elastic is making a big push into SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)
Working at a company where security is extremely important - it should be important to every company, but where I work, there is a consideration for lives on the line and national security issues - there’s lots to learn here, lots for us to grow into as we move beyond basic logging and observability.
Geospatial
Another area Elastic is pushing into is geospatial.
Everything about the where of your data can be visualised, searched, point of interest identified, and integrated into other solutions.
Tiling and hex tiling of maps and compatibility with popular formats is supported.
Favourite Talks
All the talks were fascinating and rewarding, but there were two that struck a chord with me in particular.
Dr. Catherine Green gave a talk about developing the Oxford AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. She is a tremendous speaker, natural, humble, and inspiring, and it was a privilege to listen to her talk about the complexities, difficulties, triumphs, and learnings of developing a vaccine for a pandemic during a pandemic.
Likely purely coincidentally, my other favourite talk was medicine-related. It was about the challenges of data literacy, considering the necessary privacy of individuals with the goal of gathering as much data as possible, and the work towards using machine learning to map the colloquial language of a patient describing their symptoms into the language of professional medicine.
Wrap Up
That was a banger of a conference. If you have a chance to go, go. I came away inspired, and excited about the direction of Elastic and the potential of the platform.