Announcing UltraWarm (Preview) for Amazon Elasticsearch Service

September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details.

Today, we are excited to announce UltraWarm, a fully managed, low-cost, warm storage tier for Amazon Elasticsearch Service. UltraWarm is now available in preview and takes a new approach to providing hot-warm tiering in Amazon Elasticsearch Service, offering up to 900TB of storage, at almost a 90% cost reduction over existing options. UltraWarm is a seamless extension to the Amazon Elasticsearch Service experience, enabling you to query and visualize across both hot and UltraWarm data, all from your familiar Kibana interface. UltraWarm data can be queried using the same APIs and tools you use today, and also supports popular Amazon Elasticsearch Service features like encryption at rest and in flight, integrated alerting, SQL querying, and more.

A popular use case for our customers of Amazon Elasticsearch Service is to ingest and analyze high (and increasingly growing) volumes of machine-generated log data. However, those customers tell us that they want to perform real-time analysis on more of this data, so they can use it to help quickly resolve operational and security issues. Storage and analysis of months, or even years, of data has been cost prohibitive for them at scale, causing some to turn to use multiple analytics tools, while others simply delete valuable data, missing out on insights. UltraWarm, with its cost-effective storage backed by Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), helps solve this problem, enabling customers to retain years of data for analysis.

With the launch of UltraWarm, Amazon Elasticsearch Service supports two storage tiers, hot and UltraWarm. The hot tier is used for indexing, updating, and providing the fastest access to data. UltraWarm complements the hot tier to add support for high volumes of older, less-frequently accessed, data to enable you to take advantage of a lower storage cost. As I mentioned earlier, UltraWarm stores data in Amazon S3 and uses custom, highly-optimized nodes, built on the AWS Nitro System, to cache, pre-fetch, and query that data. This all contributes to providing an interactive experience when querying and visualizing data.

The UltraWarm preview is now available to all customers in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio) and US West (Oregon) Regions. The UltraWarm tier is available with a pay-as-you-go pricing model, charging for the instance hours for your node, and utilized storage. The UltraWarm preview can be enabled on new Amazon Elasticsearch Service version 6.8 domains. To learn more, visit the technical documentation.