The Fifth Elephant 2014

This talk is for people who are planning to use Elasticsearch in their next project.

Elasticsearch is one of the core pieces of infrastructure at Helpshift, a mobile-first CRM product.

We have had mistakes and lessons learned in production, and we would like to share that so that others have a smoother experience with Elasticsearch.

Outline

The customer-facing side of Helpshift product is a simple chat feature within the app using the Helpshift mobile SDK. The business-facing side is a complex agent dashboard that helps the agent in processing as many issues as quickly as possible. We will be focusing on this business-facing side, the designs we built on top of Elasticsearch and the problems we faced and how we went about solving them, a few of them are:

1. Architecture 101 - Importance of separating master-only and data-only nodes, etc.
2. How we index documents for each customer - the flaw in having one index per customer, and possible solutions
3. Multilingual data - the importance of the phonetic plugin
4. Complex views - the importance of understanding filters and how to combine them
5. The importance of benchmarking - how we implemented using percolators for live notifications of new issues
6. Restarts & Upgrades - the importance of disabling shard allocation and clustering
7. Bulk Indexing - the importance of controlling replica count, etc.
8. Runtime debugging - the importance of cat APIs, etc.

Requirements

Preferably, audience has some basic understanding of what Elasticsearch does.

Speaker bio

I work in the backend team at Helpshift.com, a customer service platform for mobile apps, our customers include Flipboard, Supercell, Flipkart, and several others.

I have previously worked at Automatic.com (the “UI for your car” company), Infibeam.com, Adobe and Yahoo!.

I have also written a couple of Creative Commons-licensed books - A Byte of Python and A Byte of Vim.

Links

• http://www.swaroopch.com/about/