Elastic announced Search AI Lake, a first-of-its-kind, cloud-native architecture optimized for real-time, low-latency applications including search, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), observability and security.
The Search AI Lake also powers the new Elastic Cloud Serverless offering, which removes operational overhead to automatically scale and manage workloads.
With the expansive storage capacity of a data lake and the powerful search and AI relevance capabilities of Elasticsearch, Search AI Lake delivers low-latency query performance without sacrificing scalability, relevance, or affordability.
Search AI Lake benefits include:
- Boundless scale, decoupled compute and storage: Fully decoupling storage and compute enables effortless scalability and reliability using object storage, dynamic caching supports high throughput, frequent updates, and interactive querying of large data volumes. This eliminates the need for replicating indexing operations across multiple servers, cutting indexing costs and reducing data duplication.
- Real-time, low latency: Multiple enhancements maintain excellent query performance even when the data is safely persisted on object stores. This includes the introduction of smart caching and segment-level query parallelization to reduce latency by enabling faster data retrieval and allowing more requests to be processed quickly.
- Independently scale indexing and querying: By separating indexing and search at a low level, the platform can independently and automatically scale to meet the needs of a wide range of workloads.
- GAI optimized native inference and vector search: Users can leverage a native suite of powerful AI relevance, retrieval, and reranking capabilities, including a native vector database fully integrated into Lucene, open inference APIs, semantic search, and first- and third-party transformer models, which work seamlessly with the array of search functionalities.
- Powerful query and analytics: Elasticsearch’s powerful query language, ES|QL, is built in to transform, enrich, and simplify investigations with fast concurrent processing irrespective of data source and structure. Full support for precise and efficient full-text search and time series analytics to identify patterns in geospatial analysis are also included.
- Native machine learning: Users can build, deploy, and optimize machine learning directly on all data for superior predictions. For security analysts, prebuilt threat detection rules can easily run across historical information, even years back. Similarly, unsupervised models perform near-real-time anomaly detections retrospectively on data spanning much longer time periods than other SIEM platforms.
- Truly distributed - cross-region, cloud, or hybrid: Query data in the region or data center where it was generated from one interface. Cross-cluster search (CCS) avoids the requirement to centralize or synchronize. It means within seconds of being ingested, any data format is normalized, indexed, and optimized to allow for extremely fast querying and analytics. All while reducing data transfer and storage costs.
Search AI Lake powers a new Elastic Cloud Serverless offering that harnesses the innovative architecture’s speed and scale to remove operational overhead so users can quickly and seamlessly start and scale workloads. All operations, from monitoring and backup to configuration and sizing, are managed by Elastic – users just bring their data and choose Elasticsearch, Elastic Observability, or Elastic Security on Serverless.
“To meet the requirements of more AI and real-time workloads, it’s clear a new architecture is needed that can handle compute and storage at enterprise speed and scale – not one or the other,” said Ken Exner, chief product officer at Elastic. “Search AI Lake pours cold water on traditional data lakes that have tried to fill this need but are simply incapable of handling real-time applications. This new architecture and the serverless projects it powers are precisely what’s needed for the search, observability, and security workloads of tomorrow.”
Search AI Lake and Elastic Cloud Serverless are currently available in tech preview.
The Latest
In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...
Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ...
Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...
Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...
Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...
The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...
The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...
In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...
AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.