Early this morning, users around the world reported hacks of their unsecured Elasticsearch clusters. A data ransoming group attacked vulnerable clusters they found on cloud providers. This follows the widely reported instances of tens of thousands of MongoDB databases being ransomed last week. Copycats virally spread the ransoming, and the copycatting has now apparently spread to Elasticsearch.

Qbox clients have the advantage of Virtual Public Cloud peering. With this
networking connection, password protection or IP whitelisting becomes fail-safe against the unlikely scenario where AWS has a glitch in the
configuration of a network. VPC peering promises data “sovereignty,” assuring any data in the Qbox cluster is only sent to the requesting VMs owned
by the customer.

In this article, we give a brief overview of this connection, its basics, and the process to enable it.

A key question in the minds of most Elasticsearch users when they create an index is “How many shards should I use?”

In this article we explain the design tradeoffs and performance consequences of choosing different values for the number of shards. Continue reading if you want to learn how to demystify and optimize your sharding strategy.

We always make time for our customers. That’s a fact. And today we announce an even stronger commitment to our dedication to first-rate customer service. We’re always thinking about the next best step to improve the support experience and weave our hosted Elasticsearch community more tightly together.

We’ve just taken another step in that direction by implementing a two-way intercom. Our support team is available round-the-clock. Anytime you need us, we’re just a click away. Keep reading to learn about all of the goodness that we just put in place for you.

If you’re got a home-grown Elasticsearch environment, then you might not be thinking about backup automation. You might be relying on a very primitive backup solution, one that doesn’t offer any of our advanced features. If you’re like we were back in the day, you’ve got some rough measure of data security—at the cost of flexibility and periodic lapses in cluster responsiveness.

Although we’ve had backup and restore capability for quite sometime now, we’re realizing that it’s good to make a followup announcement. We have an automatic daily backup feature, which is built around the snapshot/restore API from Elasticsearch. Take a moment to read through this article and consider your options on backup and restore.

Qbox has become the premier provider of hosted Elasticsearch services. The project began as a more economical solution to Amazon’s Cloudsearch, but we quickly got caught up in the flexibility and power of Elasticsearch.

Now, several years later, we’re enjoying steady growth as we help Elasticsearch developers and ops staff reduce their aches and pains — while lowering their overall operating costs. We invite you to read this article for an overview of the major considerations of launching and scaling Elasticsearch clusters.