DEVOPSdigest

Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, is joining forces with Insight.io, a Palo Alto-based startup developing search tools that provide a semantic understanding of software source code.

In addition to adding standalone code search capabilities to Elastic's expanding technology stack, Insight.io's technology is highly complementary to other Elastic use cases and solutions.

Built on the Elastic Stack, Insight.io provides an innovative interface to search and navigate the source code that is used to build a software application. Current programming language support includes C/C++, Java, Scala, Ruby, Python, and PHP. Going beyond simple free text search, Insight.io has the ability to semantically understand the source code. This gives developers the ability to search for code pertaining to specific application functionality and dependencies, providing IDE-like code intelligence features such as cross-reference, class hierarchy, and semantic understanding. The impact of such functionality stretches far beyond exploratory question-and-answer utility, for example, enabling more efficient onboarding for new team members and reducing duplication of work for existing teams as they scale.

"We welcome a talented new team into the Elastic fold, and we are eager to provide Elastic users with access to Insight.io's Code Search functionality within a very short timeframe," commented Shay Banon, Elastic founder and CEO. "Software has become an increasingly important part of the intellectual property of companies across many industries, and we are excited to offer our users a solution for navigating, exploring, and understanding their software repositories directly with the Elastic Stack."

Initial technical integration of Insight.io technology will follow a similar path to other recent Elastic acquisitions such as Opbeat and Prelert, with a focus on creating a highly scalable, single purpose server for the new Code Search functionality. Insight.io's IDE-like user interface will be released as an official Kibana app, with the full solution then included into the standard distribution of the Elastic Stack.

"We founded Insight.io to create a tool that would enable code development efficiency and insight for the millions of developers building new applications," said Chongzhe Li, co-founder of Insight.io. "A few years ago, we decided to build our product on top of the Elastic Stack because it allowed us to build the best product for our users. Now, joining forces with Elastic, we will be able to fulfill our vision and more."

On the operational side, Elastic will be welcoming all Insight.io's employees into its development team. Co-founded by Fuyao Zhao, Chongzhe Li, and Mengwei Ding, based in Palo Alto, CA, Insight.io also has an engineering team based in Beijing, giving Elastic its first formal development team in China.

"We are a globally distributed company, and there is so much opportunity for us to hire talented developers in China to help us build features across all our products. Joining forces with Insight.io gives us a strong team with the skills and experience to help grow our Chinese presence," said Banon.