Request for Support of Plugins and Extensions in Elasticsearch Serverless

Hi Elasticsearch Community,

I’m currently exploring the use of Elasticsearch’s serverless model for my project, and I’ve encountered a limitation that I wanted to raise for discussion. Specifically, I need to use the Analytics-ICU plugin, but it seems that Elasticsearch Serverless does not currently support plugins or extensions.

This limitation is outlined in the public documentation, which notes that custom plugins and extensions are not supported in the serverless model and are not planned for future support. Given the value of serverless for its scalability and cost-effectiveness, the lack of plugin support is a significant constraint for use cases like mine, which rely on specific functionalities such as extended Unicode support provided by the ICU Analysis plugin.

I’d like to propose adding plugin and extension support to Elasticsearch Serverless, as it would enable a much broader range of use cases for users like me who want the flexibility of serverless while still leveraging the powerful ecosystem of plugins available in Elasticsearch’s traditional deployments.

I’m curious if there are ongoing discussions within the community or Elastic’s team about potentially introducing plugin support to the serverless model. Is this something on the roadmap, or could it be considered in the future?

I’d also love to hear how others in the community are working around this limitation. Are there creative solutions for achieving similar functionality without the use of plugins in serverless?

The ICU plugin is available by default in Serverless.