Elasticsearch Serverless: The Transition from Stateful to Stateless

This conference talk at Devoxx Greece 2025 explores how Elasticsearch is evolving from a stateful to a serverless architecture. Discover how Elasticsearch Serverless (ES3) achieves exceptional scalability without administrative overhead by decoupling compute from storage and utilizing affordable object storage solutions like S3. Learn about the technical design that maintains the same APIs and read-after-write semantics while simplifying node tiers to just indexing and search. Speaker Iraklis Psaroudakis explains the implementation of batched compound commits for wrapping Lucene files onto object storage, translog buffering techniques for recovery, and how refresh and search semantics operate in this new paradigm. Particularly valuable for those working with observability and security systems that require rapid searches across growing data volumes.