Elasticsearch is a really scalable solution that can fit a lot of needs, but the bigger and/or those needs become, the more understanding & infrastructure you will need for your instance to be running correctly. Elasticsearch is not problem-free - you can get yourself in a lot of trouble if you are not following good practices and/or if are not managing the cluster correctly. Licensing is a big decision point here as Elasticsearch is a middleware component - be sure to read the licensing agreement of the version you want to try before you commit to it. Same goes for long-term support - be sure to keep yourself in the know for this aspect you may end up stuck with an unpatched version for years.
If you have a cluster of nodes with MariaDB MaxScale and you want all the nodes of the cluster to have a similar load and not to be be penalized for queries or writes to the database, you can mount the MaxScale product in front of the MariaDB cluster. MaxScale will balance the requests based on what is being sent to each node to have an equitable load and will cache the queries that it sends to each one. This optimizes the response time to database queries and spreads the load out among all nodes in a similar way.
As I mentioned before, Elasticsearch's flexible data model is unparalleled. You can nest fields as deeply as you want, have as many fields as you want, but whatever you want in those fields (as long as it stays the same type), and all of it will be searchable and you don't need to even declare a schema beforehand!
Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, is super strong financially and they have a great team of devs and product managers working on Elasticsearch. When I first started using ES 3 years ago, I was 90% impressed and knew it would be a good fit. 3 years later, I am 200% impressed and blown away by how far it has come and gotten even better. If there are features that are missing or you don't think it's fast enough right now, I bet it'll be suitable next year because the team behind it is so dang fast!
Elasticsearch is really, really stable. It takes a lot to bring down a cluster. It's self-balancing algorithms, leader-election system, self-healing properties are state of the art. We've never seen network failures or hard-drive corruption or CPU bugs bring down an ES cluster.
To get started with Elasticsearch, you don't have to get very involved in configuring what really is an incredibly complex system under the hood. You simply install the package, run the service, and you're immediately able to begin using it. You don't need to learn any sort of query language to add data to Elasticsearch or perform some basic searching. If you're used to any sort of RESTful API, getting started with Elasticsearch is a breeze. If you've never interacted with a RESTful API directly, the journey may be a little more bumpy. Overall, though, it's incredibly simple to use for what it's doing under the covers.
MariaDB MaxScale is a powerful tool and easy to use. It has helped us a lot to improve the performance of our database queries. It implements a security layer that acts as a firewall for the databases, masks the data, or limits the results of the queries. It also integrates easily with Kafka.
We've only used it as an opensource tooling. We did not purchase any additional support to roll out the elasticsearch software. When rolling out the application on our platform we've used the documentation which was available online. During our test phases we did not experience any bugs or issues so we did not rely on support at all.
We have launched several inquiries to MariaDB MaxScale support, and they have always responded very quickly. They also want to hold frequent meetings with the client to get their opinion understand how they can help. I see a very human support that is concerned about the customer.
As far as we are concerned, Elasticsearch is the gold standard and we have barely evaluated any alternatives. You could consider it an alternative to a relational or NoSQL database, so in cases where those suffice, you don't need Elasticsearch. But if you want powerful text-based search capabilities across large data sets, Elasticsearch is the way to go.
ProxySLQ allows many simultaneous connections and allows the cache of queries in memory but it does not have high availability or scalability natively, only through external tools. HAProxy is not able to perform load balancing in an optimal way.
Instead, MariaDB MaxScale allows high availability, scalability, and data replication to external systems such as Kafka. In addition, MaxScale has a monitor that allows you to see the status of the set of databases.
We have had great luck with implementing Elasticsearch for our search and analytics use cases.
While the operational burden is not minimal, operating a cluster of servers, using a custom query language, writing Elasticsearch-specific bulk insert code, the performance and the relative operational ease of Elasticsearch are unparalleled.
We've easily saved hundreds of thousands of dollars implementing Elasticsearch vs. RDBMS vs. other no-SQL solutions for our specific set of problems.
