ELK
2 min read
Here at Logit.io, we're always interested to see how major corporations utilise Elasticsearch and the ELK stack - there are always lessons to be learned from such use cases. Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s most influential investment banks, has turned to Elasticsearch and plans to adapt the open-source software to put it to work for a variety of multinational corporations.
The Goldman Sachs seal of approval could be a real boost for the Apache Lucene-based software. Elasticsearch is designed to scan text sources, but Goldman Sachs’ in-house team of development engineers is working on data retrieval and ways to tailor Elasticsearch to handle unstructured data.
Don Duet, Goldman Sachs Technology Division Global Co-Head, is confident that the software can revolutionise client systems and will add value to major organisations. “Elastic is one of the most interesting open-source products we have seen in the last couple of years,” he said.
Elasticsearch and its siblings in the ELK Stack, Logstash and Kibana, are written in Java. This allows enterprise developers to swiftly adapt and integrate the ELK stack into a variety of applications. Whilst Kibana can be used as part of this stack it can also be used interchangeably with Grafana, find out more in this guide to Kibana vs Grafana.
The Goldman Sachs technology division has applied Elasticsearch to a variety of tasks with the bare minimum of work. This includes an application to help the clients track trades, the legal department search for contracts and the software engineering team to track bugs swiftly.
The legal application has saved Goldman Sachs endless man hours, as the only way to find an exact clause in a sheaf of contracts was for a team of lawyers to go through them manually. Now, with Apache Tika, the contracts have been digitised with optical character recognition and content analysis software and they can now be searched in seconds.
Tika recognised more than 1,000 file formats and created search engine indexes from the metadata it extracted. The data was then fed into Elasticsearch and now every contract is automatically scanned for required terminology, which eliminates mistakes, and a specific contract can be located immediately.
Goldman has more than 700 developers working on this Elasticsearch technology and looking at how to incorporate it into a variety of different programmes. Several thousand Goldman Sachs employees are now using Elasticsearch as part of their daily lives and that means it will find its way to a lot more major companies in the near future.
Not every company needs Goldman Sachs' resources to make the most of Elasticsearch, and the ELK stack can help enterprise companies of any size. Our ELK as a Service platform can help revolutionise your search capabilities within your own website and database. Get in touch with us at logit.io to find out more.
If you enjoyed this post on how Goldman Sachs uses Elasticsearch then why not check out our blog on the essential phases of SDLC or learn something new with our guide on how to learn Java with little to no prior programming experience?