How Alibaba Cloud Made Elasticsearch Fully Serverless: Architecture & Performance Gains

At the Elastic China Developer Conference 2023, Alibaba Cloud publicly disclosed the product‑technology architecture behind the complete serverless transformation of Elasticsearch. Leveraging a cloud‑native foundation, the service continuously optimizes its core, delivering a simpler, more stable, and highly elastic search cloud offering.

Technical breakthroughs drive continuous product innovation

Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch provides a cloud‑native operations platform that supports elastic scaling, intelligent inspection, and streamlined daily management. By upgrading the underlying architecture to a cloud‑native model, the platform offers flexible cluster changes, with the new 7.16 and 8.5 versions enabling cluster creation in as little as five minutes.

To address the large data volumes and high write throughput of log scenarios—often leading to high costs and unstable services—the team developed the OpenStore engine, an elastic, high‑efficiency, low‑cost intelligent storage solution. OpenStore charges based on actual stored data, eliminating the need for pre‑reserved capacity and achieving true storage serverless. It supports custom hot‑cold storage versions and an intelligent hybrid storage model that breaks traditional hot‑cold separation, reducing data ingestion complexity and cutting storage costs. Thanks to cloud‑native read‑write separation and compute‑storage separation, write performance improves by up to 60%, index storage size shrinks by over 40%, and query performance rises by at least 30%.

Alibaba Cloud partners with the Elastic community to grow the ecosystem

The TimeStream engine is a joint effort between Alibaba Cloud and the Elastic community, exemplifying their collaborative ecosystem building. Designed to meet high TPS writes, complex queries, and costly storage for time‑series data, the engine adopts the same indexing model as regular indices, lowering the usage barrier. Data compression, reduced metadata, and down‑sampling dramatically cut storage space while delivering qualitative query performance gains.

During the conference, Alibaba Cloud received the 2023 Elastic Partner Ecosystem Special Contribution Award, marking a new phase in the partnership. Elastic founder and CTO Shay Banon praised the close collaboration, noting Alibaba Cloud’s valuable feedback on Elastic 8.7 and the contributions of engineer Wei Zijun, who submitted over 40 PRs and actively participated in feature and performance discussions. The two companies will continue co‑building an open ecosystem to provide Chinese users with an enhanced cloud search experience.