TL;DR by using more of the available features in ElasticSearch, you can probably replace all of your external app with ElasticSearch. A few things: - ElasticS

TL;DR by using more of the available features in ElasticSearch, you can probably replace all of your external app with ElasticSearch. A few things: - ElasticSearch is definitely not schema-less, but it can try to generate a schema (aka "mapping") for you if you don't give it one: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/hadoop/current/mapping.html http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/hadoop/c... - ElasticSearch has tons of ways to customize the data you get back, so, unless you really don't want the ES cluster crunching things for you, you can do a lot of the transformation server-side. You can go so far as to have your own type + mapping for e.g. a report, which sources data from another type and transforms it: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/mapping-transform.html http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/referenc... - This covers both why the schema can't, by nature, be dynamic (so the argument of "schema-less / dynamic schema" is BS in practice IMO), as well as how to get data out from one index an into another (e.g. your "report" index which does scripted transformation). - Another idea would be to use the scripting module to write a custom "view": http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/modules-scripting.html http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/referenc... - You can use Groovy, mvel, JS, or Python for scripts. If you combine this with how ES lets you do "site plugins", you could make a JS + CSS + HTML site which is actually served by the ES cluster, which interacts with it and generates reports or whatever all without additional infrastructure. Example: https://github.com/karmi/elasticsearch-paramedic https://github.com/karmi/elasticsearch-paramedic