Elasticsearch started as a way for Shay Banon's wife to search her recipes. By 2018 it ran inside thousands of companies, often before anyone in purchasing knew it was there. Developers used the free, open source engine to search huge piles of text, logs and events in near real time. Elastic, the company behind it, sold support, hosted services and extra features on top. Its public offering tested whether that open source model could carry a large public company.

Free Software as the Bait

Shay Banon began writing search software while building a recipe search tool for his wife, who was training as a chef. He released Elasticsearch as open source in 2010, and developers passed it around fast. In 2012 Banon and his co-founders formed a company around it. Their bet came in two halves. Free software would win the users. Companies that ran it at scale would then pay for help running it.

Fencing Out the Cloud Giants

Elastic priced at $36 a share in October 2018, and the stock nearly doubled on its first day. Growth kept coming as logs, security and observability became its main markets. Cloud providers had started to offer Elasticsearch as their own service. Elastic changed its license to stop them. The company remains public, with its headquarters split between the Netherlands and California, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange.

Cover: Tycho Brahe, Astronomer, Jacques de Gheyn, II. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for an astronomer (search).