It was two weeks ago, and our startup was on the precipice of a major launch. We had completely rewritten our online publication site, which drives the bulk of our traffic. The product had to be shipped on-time - we had press releases, eager investors and a launch party dependent on it.

A few days before launch, things were not looking good. As admins manipulated articles in preparation for the launch, the servers kept crashing.

In a time-constrained major launch like this, a lot of nasty little hacks build up in the codebase. Our search system for admins was a complete mess. It was a custom solution that worked fine when admins managed a handful of database records, but now that they were managing thousands of articles, it was not scaling at all.

At the 11th hour, we dropped elasticsearch into our infrastructure. It worked like a charm. The servers stopped crapping out, and we launched on time.

Elasticsearch mostly "just works", and we didn't have to worry about complex schema definitions, working with giant complex XML files (hello Solr), or build anything on top to interface between the index and the queries themselves (Lucene). Thanks elasticsearch, you saved us!