Can I use x-pack features on a self-hosted cluster?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
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Hi there,

I'm looking into using the wildcard field type, I noticed it was part of 'x-pack' which I was not familiar with previously. After reading a bit about it, I'm quite confused. It seems to me that parts of x-pack are free and available without any activation, while other parts require a subscription, additionally some (or all?) features are available in a 30 day trial. It's unclear to me what this means for my application. I seem to be able to use the wildcard field on my development machine. Am I free to just use that without paying any sort of subscription, or is that violating the license, or is it going to stop functioning after 30 days? And if it just freely available to use, why is it part of x-pack at all? My hunch is that it was originally introduced as part of x-pack because that put it under a different license, but now everything uses the same license, so maybe things that are free don't need to part of x-pack anymore?

For some background: We are hosting elasticsearch ourselves, currently running 7.14 using the official Ubuntu packages.

Thanks!

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Hi @blunckr Welcome to the community and thanks for trying Elasticsearch.

Apologies for the confusion I'll try to help a bit.

First I would refer to the Subscription Page here which shows which features are included in the Basic / Free and Open Tier.

The FREE AND OPEN - BASIC tier which is the Official default distribution from Elastic includes many X-Pack Features.

X-Pack is really a legacy term as all these features are now under the Elastic License.

However you will still see a number of places where we refer to these features as X-Pack, I suspect that over time that terminology will begin to deprecate, but it is also used in the code to designate code that was never part of the original OSS code base. (probably TMI)

Many of these X-Pack features are free to use in our Basic tier.

The wildcard field type is part of the Basic Distribution so you can use it without a paid commercial license. You can use Any / All the feature listed on the Subscription Page under The FREE AND OPEN - BASIC heading for Free.

So tl;dr You can use wildcard field type and many other features for free with you self hosted cluster.

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Awesome, that makes sense. That's basically what I understood but I wanted to make sure I wasn't headed down the wrong path. Thanks for the quick response!

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