Back in 2016, Thomas Hazel, founder, and CTO of CHAOSSEARCH approached me with an ambitious idea — change the search and analytics market with disruptive new technology and approach. So, we joined forces and bootstrapped the concept, getting feedback on his idea before securing Seed funding in early 2017. We brought in our first wave of engineers and got to work building and testing an early prototype.
Last Fall we closed our Series A funding and began working with organizations on the beta release of CHAOSSEARCH. Our entry into the market gained immediate interest and highlighted the challenges customers face when trying to manage data at scale in a cost-effective way. Over the past several months we’ve worked with more than 50 organizations, from small teams to large enterprises with thousands of employees and developers. The feedback we received helped shape our roadmap and service delivery. As of today, we’ve incorporated hundreds of new features designed to allow customers to store all the data they want and quickly search and analyze that data without ever moving it from their own S3 infrastructure.
Today, I’m thrilled to say we’ve formally announced general availability (GA) of CHAOSSEARCH — a search and analytics platform. This is a significant milestone for our company because CHAOSSEARCH is delivering an industry first — search and analytics on AWS S3 with a fully managed service that provides high-performance and scalability, at low cost.
What is CHAOSSEARCH and who is it designed to help
At its core, CHAOSSEARCH is a data platform on AWS that converts a customer's Amazon S3 into a searchable database cluster, at high-performance and low cost. We’ve developed a new universal file format and distributed architecture that indexes data directly on a customer’s S3, with a compression ratio similar to Gzip.
CHAOSSEARCH is designed for anyone struggling with managing their own Elasticsearch database or ELK Stack for logging. Due to costs, businesses typically keep one or two weeks of historical log data on hand, and then back up and/or archive data to a cheaper storage medium. The problem with that is — how do you get actionable intelligence from cold data stores. Wouldn’t it be great to always have access to all your data, live, without having to restore backups or manually bring in other data sources that weren’t being logged?
So that’s what we’ve done — we’ve extended the S3 REST API and exposed the Elasticsearch API — and that’s just for starters (MongoDB, JDBC, SQL coming soon, and other clouds as well). Primary use cases today are log management, threat hunting, and application and security analytics. Best of all, the pricing is disruptive, starting at 50% the cost of traditional solutions.
CHAOSSEARCH at a glance
Here are a few highlights that the CHAOSSEARCH platform delivers today:
- Fully-managed service based on your Amazon S3 storage
- Turns Amazon S3 into a searchable Elasticsearch cluster
- No data movement or external storage of your private data
- Built-in data cataloging and organizing services for S3 management
- One-click schema detection, normalization, and indexing at any scale
- Data refinery console for advanced data transformations, no re-indexing
- Elasticsearch compatible API with fully integrated Kibana visualization
- Multi-tenancy and Account Management for optimized usage/capacity planning
- Separation of storage from compute, enabling infinite data retention at any scale
- Ability to capture and index 100% of your machine data at 50% of the cost of traditional solutions
And this is just the beginning!
It’s been an amazing journey. We’re now up and running with our first customers, and early demand for the platform has been much higher than anticipated. The past couple years have been a whirlwind and the CHAOS Team has put in a lot of hard work but seeing the progress and satisfied customers makes it all worthwhile.
All good things must come to an end… and be replaced with something far better. So, whether you’re in DevOps and struggling to stay on top of managing a complex Elasticsearch database or a Chief Product Officer looking to extract more value from your data, CHAOSSEARCH is for you. After all, we want you to store everything, so you can ask anything!
