Elasticsearch Version Supported with Rally

[Deb]

Does all features of Rally work with Elasticsearch 2.3.x or 5.0.0 is the minimum ES version for rally?

I could not find anything related to this in the doc

[lukas_vlcek]

I don't think all features are supported across all ES versions. For example plugins are supported starting with ES 5.x only: see https://esrally.readthedocs.io/en/latest/elasticsearch_plugins.html

Disclaimer: I have started experimenting with Rally just recently, so do not take me for granted ATM.

[lukas_vlcek]

Also I found the following notice here: Pipelines - Rally 2.10.0.dev0 documentation

[...] The earliest supported version is Elasticsearch 1.7.0.

Though not sure if this is correct answer to your question. Strictly speaking it may apply to the --distribution-version option only.

[danielmitterdorfer]

Hi @Deb,

@lukas_vlcek is correct. The earliest version that works with Rally is Elasticsearch 1.7 (actually, even earlier 1.x versions should work). It's also correct that some features will not work with earlier versions of Elasticsearch:

• Benchmarking with plugins works only with 5.x or later: As you might have noted, you can have Rally set up the cluster for you before benchmark or you can use Rally just as a load generator and set up the cluster yourself. In the latter case, you can install plugins on older cluster versions as you see fit and use Rally to generate load. It's just that you cannot use Rally to set up the cluster for you in that case.
• Benchmarking source builds works only with 5.x or later. The reason is that Elasticsearch has switched from Maven to Gradle as a build tool with 5.0 and there is no point in supporting two build tools.

In general, there is not much code in Rally that is depending on the version of Elasticsearch. This is rather covered in tracks and cars (see https://github.com/elastic/rally-tracks and https://github.com/elastic/rally-teams respectively) which use dedicated git branch to account for differences between Elasticsearch versions.

Having that said, Elasticsearch 1.x is end of life since January 2017 and in the interest of maintainability, Rally will drop support for older versions of Elasticsearch at some point. However, as long as it is feasible, I want to keep it around.

Daniel