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RE: What are the drawbacks of Elastic Sidecar?

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Fernando Fernandez, modified 4 Years ago.
What are the drawbacks of Elastic Sidecar?
Expert Posts: 401 Join Date: 8/22/07 Recent Posts

Hi guys,

I should start by confessing that I never paid much attention to the "install your own elastic" warning on startup, except on larger projects, but I get that it's an important issue when you need to be careful with memory and CPU issues. Nowadays, with the Sidecar Elastic process available since 7.3 GA4, I'm even more relaxed.  :-)

Still, when the server goes up, we get a warning saying: "Liferay automatically starts a child process of Elasticsearch named sidecar for convenient development and demonstration purposes. Do NOT use sidecar in production. Refer to the documentation for details on the limitations of sidecar and instructions on configuring a remote Elasticsearch connection in the Control Panel.". I've tried to find said documentation but was unable to find it. So, here I am, asking for advice on why we shouldn't rely on the new Sidecar Elastic and why we should still install a separate ES server.

Any ideas?

TIA

Fernando

elasticsearch
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Fernando Fernandez, modified 4 Years ago.
RE: What are the drawbacks of Elastic Sidecar? (Answer)
Expert Posts: 308 Join Date: 2/13/13 Recent Posts

Hi Fernando, see Using the Sidecar or Embedded Elasticsearch. It's light on the details you're looking for but it would be the applicable article.

 

Also, in Installing Elasticsearch we point out that Sidecar uses the OSS Elasticsearch, which can't be secured.

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Fernando Fernandez, modified 4 Years ago.
RE: RE: What are the drawbacks of Elastic Sidecar?
Expert Posts: 401 Join Date: 8/22/07 Recent Posts

Thanks for the links Russel! I had searched but wasn't able to find them. 

Besides the lack of encryption (not much needed for same machine connection) and lack of official support from Liferay, do you see any other technical drawbacks?  

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Russell Bohl, modified 4 Years ago.
RE: RE: What are the drawbacks of Elastic Sidecar?
Expert Posts: 308 Join Date: 2/13/13 Recent Posts

I don't know how serious these will be for your use case, but here are a few drawbacks:

Startup and Shutdown would be tied to the portal, which could have repercussions if you want to do maintenance on any one server.

I'm not sure how you would upgrade the Sidecar if you need a fix or want features from a newer version.

Liferay engineers have modified teh elasticsearch distribution. I know these have modifications have been significant enough that Elastic wouldn't support the distro shipped as Sidecar, and I can't say for sure whether they'd have technical impacts to production uses.

 

That's all I have for now, have a Merry Christmas!