With Elasticsearch 1.x and Elasticsearch 2.x, the various products which work together have to be chosen and dealt with individually. Many aspects are purely decided based on prior Elastic Stack experience. With Elastic Stack (5.x), these products (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Beats and X-Pack) have all come together and now really form a stack (platform) with minimal trial and error on various versions. This aspect has made implementing Elasticsearch very easier as compared to earlier versions.
This figure shows the Elastic Stack with harmonized working of all components:
Figure 09: Elastic Stack 5.x (all icons courtesy of https://www.elastic.co/v5)
In the next subsections, we will discuss each of the components forming Elastic Stack in adequate detail for your understanding. Again, these wouldn't delve too deep into each component, but would give adequate details for playing with the examples...
